Are My Ideas Being Stolen? If So, What Then? 508
BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."
Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to think like you. Very paranoid about whatever I thought were great ideas. Don't tell anyone. Ask for a non-disclosure (NDA). I was so convinced that if I even hinted at some of my ideas, everyone would try to steal them from me.
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
It took me maybe 10 years to figure that out. I have a few patents, got sued too. The value of a great idea is in its execution.
Take the idea and run with it. Make it happen. Code, develop, market, etc. Just like military planning, great ideas don't survive their first implementation, but they have the potential to evolve in something great.
I have good news for you though: your question is typical of budding entrepreneurs. The simple fact that you even ask is a sign that you'll do great in the future. Just add some experience (~5 years) and you'll have the perfect mix.
Don't believe everything your read. The example in the article is the one in a million occurrence. That's not the kind of odds you want to shoot for.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/ [fairsoftware.net] -- where software developers and citizen journalists create fair businesses
Don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean to sound rude, but you probably won't do anything anyone would care to steal (aside from another student) while you're in school anyway.
If you are doing something really interesting, use your own computer to do it. You could still discuss it with your professors and fellow students, but maybe it would be harder for them to take your work.
Develop your ideas on your own time and resources (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to disconnect your ideas from the University, you have to make absolutely sure that you don't develop your ideas on university time or property.
Therefore, document when and where you're working on your idea, and have evidence that can, as clearly as possible, make a case for your having worked on this idea on your own time, with your own resources.
Protecting yourself? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, first, be careful what you sign. And second, don't use college resources or turn in any code from your project in as homework. People wonder why America is losing its edge and it's because corporations and organizations steal ideas from the poor to make themselves rich. The net result is there is no incentive for innovation unless it is under contract, NDA, lock and key. Which is another way of saying there will be no innovation, at least not in this country. The concept of intellectual property is artificial and harmful to the public good, but our legislators don't care because they've reduced the definition of the public good to the Gross Domestic Product.
If you want to innovate... Move to a developing country. The United States is just a stagnant cesspool when it comes to science and technology these days.
Don't worry about it (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your ideas are so good, (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you really care, don't work on any of your ideas using school resources, and don't mention them to people. Then no one will steal them. Patents are kind of expensive for a student, and may not be valid anyway.
Once again, stop being so selfish. You'll be happier in life (and richer!) if you just focus on producing, and not on preventing other people from producing.
Publish it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody can steal it and patent it if you publish it. Of course, that means you can't patent it, either.
But publish it right here on /.
I won't steal your idea....honest....
Federally Financed and School Resources (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
Either that or else it's obvious and everyone's going to do it. I had an idea for an MMO strikingly similar to Eve Online, but I'm absolutely certain they didn't steal the idea from me.
The value of a great idea is in its execution.
And that encapsulates the entire conversation. It's rare for the first software product to market to dominate for a long time. Windows wasn't the first OS or even graphical OS to market. WoW wasn't the first MMO, and it wasn't even the first that incorporated all of its ideas. Doing it right is more important than doing it first.
Re:Protecting yourself? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there's a flip side to that as well. The American desire to get rich quick has completely polluted the whole concept of research and innovation for the sake of science and not just as a means to buy a solid gold Bentley. For every evil corporation that "stole" an idea from a student, I'd wager there's a student who went to a state school on a publicly-paid scholarship, came up with a million-dollar idea, and immediately went "MINE! MINE! ALL MINE!"
Re:Publish it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody can steal it and patent it if you publish it.
This is the USPTO we're talking about. They'll grant a patent on the wheel if you can obfuscate the claims adequately.
I've found it to be true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken
US computer scientist (1900 - 1973)
Keep it to yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)
I like lists:
1. Ideas cannot be patented or copyrighted. If you let an idea out of your head and someone hears it, they can use it. Now, you can ask people to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and non-compete agreement, but I doubt your professors would sign.
2. If someone else tries to patent something you have created, you have prior art. You can't get a patent for it, but you can void their patent. Yeah, it's a pain, but it can be done.
3. I'd be more worried about other students. Your professors probably have a sweet deal. At my school, it meant 6-figure salary and teaching 0-1 classes per semester and spending the rest of one's time investigating what they found interesting. Why would they leave that for the competition of free enterprise? Your other students might have dreams of grandeur and snatch your stuff more readily.
4. If you're a grad student doing research for them and they're paying you and giving you free tuition, you likely have no protection since they're your employer and what you make is legally their property unless you've explicitly made another arrangement.
I'm from the camp that ideas are a dime a dozen and that execution is what matters. If you talk about it, most likely no one will use your idea because they won't execute. Most likely you won't either - not because you're bad or lazy, but because executing something from scratch takes a lot (both work and chance).
So, don't worry too much and if you don't want someone stealing your idea, keep it to yourself.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Insightful)
After I do a consult with prospective clients, someone always asks me "Why should we pay you since you just told us what we needed to do? We can just go do it ourselves." This is pretty close to the sentiment of the article.
I always say the same thing: "What to do is free, how to do it costs money, asking me how to do it after you try to do it yourself will cost you double and I won't even have to raise my price."
Knowing how to execute a particular idea is always better than the original idea, because you have the hands on knowledge to improve it and improvise with it.
Seriously, what would you expect? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you paid a few million dollars for infrastructure, then tought people how to use it, and taught them how to do things and how to think, and then they used your tools, and the knowledge you taught them, on their premisses, while you were teaching them, to invent something, you'd expect it to be yours too.
They aren't stealing it from you. You're giving it to them. There are some schools that opt to waive this obvious right, but they do so as an incentive to attract students, not because they don't have the right in the first place.
If you don't want your ideas to become theirs -- and it's up for debate that they'd be your ideas in the first place since you're being taught -- then follow a few simple guidelines:
- don't do your work using university tools/machines. If you didn't purchase that time with the particle accellerator, then it wasn't yours to use.
- don't do your work while taking a course that teaches you how to do that kind of work. Otherwise, it's simply your homework.
- don't do your work during school hours, on school premisses, or with school personnel. If it's more them than it is you, who are you foolin'?
Look, it's quite simple. If while going to school to take theorhetical mathematics, you spent your nights in your basement, in your own home, with mastercraft tools, building car motor that runs on urine, your university won't claim that they own it just because you added 2 + 2 in your notes -- and no judge will back them up if they try.
Contrast that with taking an applied engineering and mechanics course, and spending the hour before and after every tutorial session in the school's mechanics garage, with the school's million-dollar nasa engine prototype, building a car motor that runs on urine. If it was your idea -- and wasn't suggested by your professor as a part of teaching -- it wasn't your tools, your investment, or your anything else. And odds are your professor gave you special credit for working on it.
In short, if you work for someone else, and you don't spend any money of your own, it's not really your invention. Ideas are crap, there's no shortage of them. Work, infrastructure, tools, resources, and investment is for real. Only the work part could be considered yours, and you probably got helping hands from other students and faculty in the process.
Re:Protecting yourself? (Score:2, Insightful)
For every evil corporation that "stole" an idea from a student, I'd wager there's a student who went to a state school on a publicly-paid scholarship, came up with a million-dollar idea, and immediately went "MINE! MINE! ALL MINE!"
Yeah, but what's the point in funding education if not so people can make a contribution to society (and le gasp! benefit from it themselves)? Corporations by definition don't create anything -- people do. Corporations are what take from some people to give to others, as a social construct. And this is why they're evil, not because a corporation steals (it cannot do such a thing because it's an intangible), but because a corporation as a social construct enables a few to steal and profit from the work of the many. Tell Marx I said hi too, if you see him. ;)
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth adding that in the real world you don't keep your ideas. When you accept a job you are required to sign a piece of paper that assigns ALL your rights to your employer. The corporation automatically gets your ideas and you keep nothing.
About the only way you can "escape" that obligation is to develop your ideas in your basement on your own time, but even then the corporation will claim the idea came during workhours and sue your to acquire the patent rights. It's fun living in corporate tyranny. ;-)
From Michael Abrash (Score:5, Insightful)
In "The Zen of Graphics Programming", Michael Abrash (a co-author of Quake and inventor of Mode X) wrote:
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Our world is changing, and I'm concerned. By way of explanation, three anecdotes.
Anecdote the first: In one of his books, Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told me how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.
Anecdote the second: I've been programming micros for 15 years, and been writing about them for more than a decade and, until about a year ago, I had never-not once!- had anyone offer to sell me a technical idea. In the last year, it's happened multiple times, generally via unsolicited email along the lines of Herbert's tale.
This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I've noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else?s hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, "I'm so smart that my ideas alone set me apart." Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime's worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it's not the ideas; it's design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.
Virtually every idea I've encountered in 3-D graphics was invented decades ago. You think you have a clever graphics idea? Sutherland, Sproull, Schumacker, Catmull, Smith, Blinn, Glassner, Kajiya, Heckbert, or Teller probably thought of your idea years ago. (I'm serious-spend a few weeks reading through the literature on 3-D graphics, and you'll be amazed at what's already been invented and published.) If they thought it was important enough, they wrote a paper about it, or tried to commercialize it, but what they didn't do was try to charge people for the idea itself.
A closely related point is the astonishing lack of gratitude some programmers show for the hard work and sense of community that went into building the knowledge base with which they work. How about this? Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to "own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.
Put that way, it sounds like a silly idea, but the idea behind software patents is precisely that eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifylng and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle's waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I've come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn't been available, Hendrix's unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthe
Re: Photosounder (Score:3, Insightful)
I peeked at it. Interesting idea, though a little tricky to determine some important information because your demo is heavily crippled.
File Size: Is that "Sound-Picture" smaller than a typical Mp3? Does your full version even fully support Mp3?
If a picture turns out to be more compressed than a straight audio file, that might be a neat way to save space.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. I see it like this... There are basically a few key elements to a financially successful idea. You have to either succeed at all of them or succeed at a few and get lucky on the rest in order to get anywhere with your ideas.
You can hire people to help with some of these steps, but all of them need to either be performed or obviated by sheer, dumb luck. Marketing is the easiest to get help with, although the marketroids still need to understand the idea in order to do their job right.
But it's #2 that this article is concerned about, really: The fear is that a professor or graduate assistant will recognize that your idea is good and take the remaining steps behind your back. Don't worry about that. As others have pointed out, your ideas just aren't that good just yet. Learn to recognize good ideas first, and then start filtering which of them you share with the class in order to get the grades without giving up a goldmine.
Just pray that, when you do have that idea that you recognize as being good, you are able to take the remaining steps. That's what you need to prepare yourself for today, anyhow, while you're still in school: Become adept at recognizing good ideas and developing them. Before you know it, you'll be the one "stealing" ideas and making millions.
Re:Don't worry about it (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not a lawyer:
It would be even better to just leave without signing the NDA. While it didn't seem to bite you, I can see this scenario biting someone else. Chances are they see you performing similar work, and wanted to merge your work with theirs. If you signed their NDA, you'll have to go through the extra step of proving your work doesn't incorporate any of their ideas after the information was disclosed.
Defending their accusations would be easier for a more established project (especially an open source one) that has already published previous work incorporating the contested ideas. However it's not cheap. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Still the NDA will effectively kill any unpublished work that may incorporate similar ideas disclosed (despite being developed in parallel without prior knowledge of information covered by the NDA).
In this day an age, I practice better safe than sorry.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you can get away with striking such clauses in the employment contract almost everywhere. I've done it at 5 jobs now and not one has blinked.
Re:Don't worry about it (Score:5, Insightful)
The best advice my I've had in this area was from my supervisor, before I started my PhD. He said (paraphrasing slightly) that PhD students rarely, if ever, came up with an idea that was worth more than the student. The best investment you can make early on in your career is in your reputation.
I'd sum the whole thing up with one sentence: Bad scientists are worried people will steal their ideas, good scientists are worried that people won't. Use the most permissive license you can find that still requires attribution, and give your ideas away. The ideas are not valuable. The person who can come up with the ideas is valuable. The more ideas you've given away, the easier it is to persuade people that you can create the one they need.
Re:Cut funding (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume you mean the school's endowment by "hoarding large pools of cash" -- in most cases, the schools are not allowed to touch the cash itself, only the interest/dividends off it. And while tuition is going up, most of those same schools are using endowment money to fund scholarships, so that relatively few students are actually paying full tuition. (To some extent, I suspect that this is a shell game. To qualify as a non-profit, they have to spend most of that interest, and the endowment rules frequently are strict about what it can be used for, but paying themselves "tuition" on behalf of a student lets them move money around and spend it on salaries and infrastructure)
License your code under the GPL! (Score:2, Insightful)
Share your code under the GPL, and others will be able to modify your code. However, their modifications must be available to you unless they intend to keep them private...which isn't what you're worried about anyway.
You can release your GPL'd code to a community of developers, and hopefully (if the idea really is that good) you can gain support and a critical mass so you can build "TheNextBigThing". When the project is in a state of maturity, you and other developers can decide what direction to take it, or if it really is the proverbial "killer app", or whatever. And along the way, if money is your motivation, you can work out a business plan.
If you really do have "TheNextBigThing", licensing under the GPL protects your code by making sure you will have access to it and its derivatives. It also creates the potential for working with a large community of developers to improve the software. If the software gains popularity, it would also be very tough for competitors (even powerful institutions) to squash it.
I might add, as well, that proprietary apps are, more and more each day, being spanked by the FOSS competition. "Live Free or Die!" has a new meaning in the world of software...
Re:From Michael Abrash (Score:3, Insightful)
Abrash is mostly right. Most of those 'great ideas' are either horribly broken or already exist in other forms. Broken because the person has this great idea that doesn't account for how things actually work. And other times the freshman think they have made this great leap, which they have for freshmen, but just reimplemented a K-D tree or something else. One or two out of those thousands of ideas might be worth investigating, but not under an NDA. Someone has an idea that they can't implement them self and they want my help, then I'm the one who gets them to sign the NDA. If I'm going to fine tune it and make it real, then they are not going to turn and sell it to someone else.
See, when it comes to these great ideas, there are two kinds of people. Those who really are smart enough to come up with earth shattering ideas as new CS students, and those who aren't. Most people think they are in the first group, but if they were, they would know how to protect the idea. Think you have come up with a new way to improve a B tree? Great, don't turn it in with your homework. I'm sure you can think of other places that professors might steal great ideas, so don't do those either.
For disclosure, I work for a university, and have my name on some published code. I know I don't own it, but I don't care. There was nothing revolutionary about it, just some neat little hacks that I gladly share. I got paid to code it, and the publicity of it was enough to cover the supposed loss of code. But I still know the tricks I used, and can re-implement them with out copying code. Since it's not patentable code, what did I loss again?
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:1, Insightful)
Couldn't be more to the point. I used to work in warehousing. While I was there I would often spend my spare time reading about improving efficiency, during my lunches I would tend to bounce my ideas off of my coworkers. One of them simply thought "efficiency" was the greatest buzzword ever and ran off to the supervisor with several of my ideas. What a goob, he lost more credibility trying to implement my well researched ideas poorly. Then about halfway through he decided he didn't want credit anymore and basically tried to slander me as the buzzword fanatical PHB wannabe. Thankfully, my supervisor was understanding, when I told him I could save one or two of the ideas he let me try it out. :) I think about the worst thing you have to fear is being blamed for someone else implementing your ideas properly, but if they can't see it's their own fault why would you want to work for/with them anyways.
In the OP's case I would think if the school wanted anything to do with one of his ideas, they would have the sense to approach him and retain their expert. Anything else would be uncivilized.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:2, Insightful)
The story is actually misquoted; Ford and Tesla aren't involved, just some Dude with a Problem and an engineer. The engineer says, "Hit here with a hammer to fix your problem" or something like that; the X is simply the marker for where the marker is.
With that setup, you can then move to the punchline; specifically that the value is not intrinsic to the X mark, but rather to knowing where to put the X. The Dude with a Problem can treat it like the X is the thing being paid for, but the engineer is pointing out that in actuality, his accrued knowledge is what is being paid for.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, I get that all the time, the "it's like MetaSynth/Coagula thing". These only turn images into sound. That's all they do. They don't edit sounds, nor will they help you learn how sounds look so you can learn how to draw your own.
This is one thing I just don't know how to communicate to the public, that it's much more than just turning images into sounds, it's just a small part of the concept, the more interesting parts that are new are that sounds are turned into images, their sound data discarded, which makes you able to transform the image-sound in new ways, apply new effects. AudioSculpt will only let you obscure some parts of the sound, correct? It won't let you stretch it around or flip it or transpose it or shift parts around or any of that.
But what's, to me, the most important thing about this program, is that you can learn how sounds are made, what features they contain, graphically, and learn from that how to reproduce them, or create something different. I try to demonstrate such things through YouTube videos, but I'm afraid it'll never make the "MetaSynth already did it" remarks go away.
And I disagree, as I said in another comment, sometimes the idea's what's the most important, sometimes it's the implementation, but in my case, while a solid implementation is essential, there's nothing so new about the techniques used and put together in this program, it's really innovative in the concepts it opens the doors to, and that's what matters the most here, the underlying concept and vision.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:1, Insightful)
That is just stupid.
Being on salary does not mean you are always on the clock. That is why people on salary have been able to successful sue for overtime for extraordinary working conditions.
Your inventions on your own time with your own resources always belong to you.
If you use employer or scholastic resources and time, then you have to give that up.
Deal with it.
Any employment contract presented to me has a space for previous inventions, and if it has a "Your work belongs to us" I take a big black marker and black out the entire section before I sign it (and get an initial).
If the employer doesn't abide by that, they don't get to hire me. Helps to not be an idiot, though. Idiots just have to put up with it and be grateful they have a job.
Like you, it seems.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:4, Insightful)
Is B-D such a big improvement? That's not what I've read.
You make it all sound cut and dried, and it isn't. It's a real nightmare trying to figure out what's valuable, and who gets compensation for the hundreds of ideas that assist the central ideas. It can't be done. Most people who maybe ought to see a little something under this total ownership system never do. Should all those giants upon whose shoulders we stand be compensated? What about the chip designers who, inspired by several diverse research papers, produced some IC that was cleverly used by another group to come up with a new way to sequence a genome, which then enables yet another research group to discover a new drug? What about the researchers who wrote those papers, and who in turn cited several dozen other papers done by yet more researchers? Where is the line between stealing an idea and being inspired by an idea?
Then, you have people hoarding ideas as if to talk about them is to lose them. This thinking of ideas as a scarce resource that must be carefully protected and managed is a real impediment to progress. Currently, pharmaceuticals is the area most impacted by this, but the disease is spreading. This is not what a University is supposed to be about. Universities are NOT short sighted profit centers trying to wring every last penny out of Intellectual Property. Businesses can try that, but universities should not. That's why universities are largely funded by other means, so that this destructive secrecy does not take hold and reduce a university to a collection of small minded guilds jealously guarding and hiding their techniques from any possibility of "exploitation" by "outsiders".
Allow the Intellectual Property Rights proponents to impose their vision, and then you'll really see us lose our technological lead. It's been happening bit by bit over the years, and we're the worse for it. That we now have students wondering if they will be "ripped off" and their ideas "stolen" is not a good sign. We've really been doing our kids a disservice, to have their heads filled with that kind of narrow possessive garbage so they could worry about such a thing.
Re:Only the paranoid survive (not) (Score:2, Insightful)
The "Real World" is whatever makes money. Corporate whoring? Check. Bad actors in bad movies? Check. Bad actors having "nip slips" on live television? Doublepluscheck.
Taking time to welcome a new neighbor to the block? Nada.