January 16, 2003
Complexities of copyright important for researchers to understand
What’s the difference between a patent and a copyright? And what laws govern them? Ask even productive researchers and you may be regarded with a blank stare.
Innovation, a typical result of research activities, can have certain legal rights — intellectual property rights — attached when they are helpful. Some kinds of intellectual property rights, such as a patent, must be applied for, and only some novel ideas are actually patentable inventions. Other rights, such as copyright, are ubiquitous because they exist automatically upon creation of a work. A “copyrighted work” is any original creation of authorship produced in a tangible medium.
Why should you care? Even if your original creation will not make you wealthy, your ability to distribute what you’ve created may be compromised if you have not taken the proper steps to manage your copyright.
The law governing patent and copyright is very different and at the University of Washington, the number of copyrighted works that are created each year by faculty, staff and students is in the thousands. Literary pieces, musical compositions, dances, photographs, paintings, maps, motion pictures, sound recordings, databases, and computer software programs are all the subject of copyright. Some creative works such as software even have elements that are both patentable and copyrighted. Given the complexity in managing these works, the UW has created an Office of Copyright & Software Ventures that has managed copyrighted works and software patents since 1997.
The general advice from the office is that, where copyright may be involved, discussions should occur when a project begins. It is much easier to put copyright agreements in place at the early stage of a project, says Charles Williams, the office’s interim director. “We definitely do not want copyright issues to get in the way of innovation or distribution,” he says. “But simply to distribute a work whether software, digital content, images or music, even for free, outside the university requires permission from the copyright owner.”
Ownership of copyright is often different than ownership of an invention. While a product or technique usually has a small group of individuals who could qualify as inventors, the owners of copyright in a software program could include anyone who contributed a single line of code — anyone who shares in the authorship. And unlike with a patent, the person who has the idea for the code may own nothing under copyright law.
“We try to work with research groups as they are forming,” Williams says. “We describe the rules of copyright and help them to shape an agreement before they produce works such as software, databases, images, and content.” These agreements can be structured in a variety of ways that aid diffusion of good ideas.
The office sees distribution as an extension of the UW’s teaching and research missions. Few copyrighted works are huge moneymakers, although many return licensing revenue sufficient to cover the costs to the research project of distributing their work to the public and industry, and help support further research and distribution of works. Even those that eventually generate significant revenue often begin their lives as works licensed for limited free distribution within a defined group.
This “research commons” can involve a group of universities and private companies that come together for the purpose of using and perfecting a software tool. The university acts as the steward of the commons and makes research tools available under license, provided that users agree not to enforce copyrights or patents resulting from improvements on UW’s research tools, upon the UW or the members of the commons. A work that undergoes this incubation might eventually make its way to a broader market and may become a standard or platform upon which other new and exciting technologies are built.
The UW’s copyright policy permits revenue gleaned from copyrights to flow directly back to the laboratories that created the work. The Office of Software & Copyright Ventures can help groups set up agreements specifying who will get charged, who won’t, and how revenues are distributed. “A product doesn’t have to be completely free or completely fee-based,” Williams says. “Sometimes, early distribution of a product will be free, until the success of the product is validated — at which point industry may get interested.”
The office is in the process of developing model agreements and documents that can be adapted to the styles and practices of individual units and departments. The Information School is serving as the pilot unit for these efforts.
The school calls its approach asset management. It entails deciding, at the beginning of a project, what are the responsibilities, obligations and privileges of those involved in the collaboration. “Documentation is crucial,” says Harry Bruce, associate dean for research. “We need to identify the contributions that all participants, including students, might be making to research, and the rights and privileges that result from their work — even if the contribution results only in recognition in the resultant publications.”
Bruce says working with the Office of Software & Copyright Ventures has been “enormously helpful.” They have developed templates that can be used by researchers in describing the value that collaborators will add to a project. The school has adopted a policy that requires all researchers to fill out these templates for every project. “When we announced the policy to faculty, those who came here from industry commented that this was common practice in the business world,” Bruce says. “Other faculty mentioned that they knew of incidents in universities where concerns arose because such steps had not been taken.”
Software & Copyright Ventures believes that the Information School, by implementing an asset management process, will be able to share research materials with academic and commercial audiences much more easily than other groups on campus, because rights and expectations of research group members will be aligned. Dana Bostrom, a specialist in the licensing of information products, says that new members who enter these projects now have a better understanding of the rights and obligations of joining a research group.
Bruce says that developing an understanding of the value that contributors bring to interdisciplinary projects is especially challenging. He is working with Software & Copyright Ventures to develop a research proposal to investigate this issue, and to develop a model of best practices for projects that are intensely collaborative. “This is the heart of what we are trying to do at the University, breaking down barriers between disciplines to study important problems,” Bruce says. “We need to assure that the asset management process provides the best possible context for a discussion of the value that participants bring to the research, so that this process does not undermine the trust and mutual respect that is essential to successful collaboration.”
While the revenue from many copyrights will be modest, it can help researchers develop a self-sustaining model for some ventures, or help to fund specific projects for outside funding is unlikely or may only be available at a later stage. And agreements up front can help to avoid unpleasant or frustrating situations that can result from too little discussion of values, rights and responsibilities.
No single answer fits every possible copyright situation, so the office encourages questions from researchers. Requests for consultation are available online, http://depts.washington.edu/ventures, or by calling 206-616-3451.
