Re: [LAD] students and copyright

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Fons Adriaensen<fons@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> Prof. Keller writes 'We employ the students ...'.
>
> That would certainly be the case for a post-graduate
> student who becomes a teaching or research assistant
> and who receives a stipend from the institute or any
> of its sponsors. The transfer of copyright is usually
> stipulated in the contract in this case (and in some
> cases, it has to be and is not automatic).
>
> It is certainly not correct for any normal student

I'm sure it depends on the country and the institute. I think you
would be right in the normal UK case -- I believe that students
(including PhD students) retain the copyright to their own work, but
in many (though not all) cases the employing institute owns the
copyright of work carried out by post-doc research assistants or other
employees. The latter is of course only the case because they have
signed contracts that specify that.

Merely being paid for your work is not enough to imply that the
institute owns your copyright -- I spent a year or so early in my
current post on a paid contract that explicitly granted me copyright,
which is why my own name appears at the top of some of Sonic
Visualiser's (GPL) source code as well as the name of my employer.
(That contract may have been given to me by mistake, but I believe
such terms are still routinely used in some places.)

For what it's worth, I can't imagine any normal situation in which
work done by a student could have its copyright owned by a professor
or other academic employee rather than the student or institute (other
than explicit assignment on request).

Of course it's not necessarily wrong to remove individual copyrights
from a header if you replace them with a suitable copyright
declaration elsewhere in the work. For example, in Rosegarden at the
moment we are in the process of replacing "copyright X, Y, and Z" with
a general "Rosegarden development team" copyright and identifying
holders by name in a single file at the source code root, though we do
leave the notes in in special cases where a particular chunk was
completely provided by a third party. So long as authors are properly
identified with the work as a whole, I don't think there is anything
problematic about that.

The authors themselves are the people who need to be happy about this
-- it isn't up to the users or other commenters how the authors are
credited. The situation with students is a matter for concern mainly
because they are often not aware of what their standing is, and
institutes sometimes don't like to make it any clearer for them. So
it's worth the reminder that they do actually have some identity as
real people as well as as students.

Chris
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Received on Mon Aug 3 00:15:04 2009