Re: joint work/U.S. govt.

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, Tyler Ochoa <tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> wrote:
>
> Juliann Krute <juliann[_at_]people-are.strange.com> wrote:
> >
> > What about joint govt-private research projects? For instance, a NASA
> > scientist and a private semiconductor lab collaborating on an article
> > about new development procedures? If the NASA scientist learned the
> > information through her official governmental research, does her
> > contribution to the article consitute acting in official capacity?
>
> I suppose I should know the answer to that question, since my sister IS
> a NASA scientist (an astronaut, actually), but I don't. At least it
> presents a realistic scenario in which the joint work problem would
> arise.
>
> To reiterate a caveat: I haven't done any research on this issue at all.
> I'm just trying to think about what would make sense. And here, we have
> conflicting policies: on the one hand, we want government works to be
> freely available to all; on the other hand, we want to encourage the
> creation of new works by giving a copyright to private parties. Since
> I'm generally in favor of a strong public domain, I suppose I think that
> the government involvement should render the article non-copyrightable;
> but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if a court found a way to reach a
> different result.

This may be why the results of the research (i.e., an invention) do get to be licensed by the private party although if I remember the statute correctly the government retains a license.

Harold Federow
<hfederow[_at_]u.washington.edu> Received on Wed Mar 25 1998 - 19:33:31 GMT