Student Fights University's Copyright Rule
The Age
Monday September 9, 1996
BE WARNED: enrolling at a university could mean signing away your copyright. For everything. Just about every university in Australia has developed policies on intellectual property that are so broad it gives them the right to tap the brains of their best and brightest students.
That's the lowdown from Alfonso del Rio, intellectual property partner at Canberra lawyers Clayton Utz, who is handling a dispute between a student and his university.
``Many universities have contracts that specify that, as a condition of enrolment, the university owns any intellectual property developed by students during the course of their studies," del Rio told Computer Age.
Anyone taking a course in software development, graphic design, even literature, could, in theory, be handing over the rights to the works they create to the university.
Del Rio's client is fighting a university claim that a multimedia product he developed as a student is the property of the university.
It cites the university policy on intellectual property. Del Rio declines to name the client or the university involved.
``What is not clear is whether these policies apply equally to full-time and part-time students - and to works the students create in their own time. This is particularly worrying where students find part-time work developing computer software programs to help pay for their studies," del Rio said.
So don't expect any Marc Andreesens to climb to the top of the software tree in Australia, he says. The pimply developer of the seminal browser Mosaic, which served as the basis for the creation of the popular browser Navigator and founded the multi-billion-dollar Internet company Netspace Communications - was a student of the University of Illinois at the time.
Del Rio said that, in Australia, no employer would hire, say, a student programmer, if they thought anything they developed would legally belong to the university.
``How universities could dream up such policies - and then have the audacity to enforce them - is beyond comprehension, " said del Rio. Such policies were nothing more than ``a big stick" used by universities trying to make money out of students.
© 1996 The Age