On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 02:14:11PM -0700, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:You should forward your example to Lynn, but I think he got tired of my questions, so maybe you should wait a few days or something.
First, I suggest you read the policy which you can find at www.techtransfer.byu.edu. The university owns what you do during your employment. Class projects, etc. are yours. If you wrote the
software
as part of our employment work through your supervisor, if it was for
a
class or personal interest, you are free to do whatever you wish with it.
I found this policy to be fairly liberal (given my limited exposure to universities' IP policies). If your involvement in a project leads to more than a ``nominal'' amount of use of university equipment, then the university apparently owns it. This is *wide* open to interpretation. But we can leave that to the lawyers to hash out if it ever comes into question :-)
Let's take an (not-so-unlikely) extreme example. The policy makes it clear that if you are getting paid by the university for the time you spend developing software, then the university ``owns'' the code (I guess this means that they claim a legally enforceable right to dictate how the code is distributed).
Suppose that, as part of my work in a security lab, I make modifications to the Linux kernel to add support for my security lab's flagship product (TrustBuilder). Because of the nature of the GPL, I must make my patches also under the GPL; in other words, I cannot modify the Linux kernel and redistribute it without also releasing the source code under the GPL. Failure to release the patched kernel code under the GPL would be a copyright violation. I suppose that in this case, the code can still be copyrighted under the university's name (or can it?), but it must be licensed under the GPL, which means that BYU cannot dictate how the code is distributed, used by others, or modified and re-distributed by others. In other words, BYU would not ``own'' the code; it is a legal impossibility, given the licensing model of the Linux kernel.
I am asking this precisely because that is what we will probably be doing in the near future; we may very well need to modify the Kerberos impelementation of the Linux kernel to add support to TrustBuilder, so that we can further our research. How does the university's IP policy jive with this circumstance?
Mike
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