Some are saying to me it is not as bad as it sounds, and that I should go because Oxbridge leads to a better life. But some agree with me on the fact that it creates very bad incentives for good research. I also asked some current PhD students what they think about it, and they told me they never even thought about who owns their work. I checked some other universities which declared that any IPR is always owned by the student, not the university. But, most seem to declare that the work is owned at least in part by the funding source, which seems fair to me.
A one commentor was very strong in their opinion that most universities and especially the UK are currently committing an intellectual suicide with how they treat their researchers.
Luckily they managed to avoid the specific IP in the papers that the university owned, and start the startup anyway. It has gone on to be a successful business.
Obviously, the university lost out in every conceivable way from this scenario. Literally any other course of action would have given them a better result. Play stupid games, etc.
edit: this was Australia btw
They think this for the same reasons all employers think this; employment is a watered down form of ownership.
Advancement up the social hierarchy allows one to abuse the people below them. As near as I can tell from my own experience: money and control are the things you receive as rewards.
A top neuro program in a major city will pay ~40K per year (and this is high relative to many other sciences). The rest of the compensation is health insurance and a meaningless "tuition" credit in order to register for a full "courseload" of research. Even at 40 hours per week that is shit compensation relative to what most of the students could be making elsewhere. The thesis project takes place over ~5 years, which is more than enough time to produce very good output on normal working hours. If students want to make their project their whole life fine, but as it stands there is way too much pressure coming from the top to do so, with minimal real benefits actually reaching the students.
It's also supervisor-dependent! After I was formally accepted into a post-grad program, I was talking to my supervisor, my then-recent engagement slipped into the conversation and h - a senior bachelor and resident grump - did not approve of me getting married. He thought it would be distraction; I very much doubt that it was departmental policy, but my future research hinged on his whims.
Also, am sure myself and others would be interested to see your current/old code.
Your university will (should!) provide talks or contact with their IP department, spin-out office, etc. You should be able to ask pertinent questions of them in confidence. Make a contact there, and ask for an off-the-record conversation, they should be amenable.
In my limited experience, universities are averse to some monetisation approaches that are frequently used in computing businesses, for example open-sourcing the code and monetising a service that deploys/supports it. (I'm aware of difficulties with this model, just using it as an example.) Instead, they are far more familiar with approaches such as patenting a new algorithm and selling enterprise licenses.
If you're planning a business model that the university would not be interested in, you should be able to get them to confirm a lack of interest. This leaves you with the issue of whether you've developed something patentable. I've never been in that position so I wouldn't know, but I'm curious about how a university would respond to a student open-sourcing every piece of code they develop as they go. Academically this seems a great thing to do, but universities are commercial enterprises, and they might take a dim view.
The usual "I am not a lawyer" caveat applies to everything I've written here. I'd also strongly advise against any action that is likely to see you go up against a university's legal department, because they'd crush you :)
[0] https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-course/examinat...
[1] https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-xvi-pr... and https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/council-regula...
But that might just be outdated or inaccurate or totally wrong.
After all, if Stanford does research funded by the US taxpayer, develops a new ML technology and gives it away for free, Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it, which they'll pay US taxes on.
But if École Polytechnique does research funded by the French taxpayer, develops a new ML technology and gives it away for free? Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it, which they'll pay US taxes on - while the French economy will see a much smaller upside.
hahahhaahhaaa. Um no. Possibly some Irish taxes? Maybe some Virgin Islands taxes?
There isn’t a way to avoid the taxation when that excess profit leaves the company somehow to shareholders. Even buybacks that cause stock appreciation lead to significant fed revenue when people sell.
I have heard this a lot. My counterargument is that if that is the case, why do they want the IP anyway? Of course they can say that the IP is half created by the professor, but on the other hand, isn't that what I am paying for the university?
> where you see the commercial possibility from the beginning and aim to do that to start your company
And yes, if you personally plan to have any stake in the IP you have to think this beforehand: you must have a stake in the private company that funds your studies. Otherwise (and in the best case, i.e. 50% split) the IP will just be split between the university and your funder. So, you have to start a company in order to ever own any IP personally. I was told that LLCs for PhDs are somewhat common nowadays by the university IP people.
Generally, I think making a billion or a million dollars on my PhD project are extraordinarily slim, but it is not like these constraints exactly help either. The way I see it, is that I already take a financial toll in opportunity costs by doing a PhD. It is borderline charity when you also give the black-swan option to the university to own all proceeds if it ever becomes of significant impact, which I thought be the whole point of science.
The whole DD process has been quite frustrating to me, as you can see, but it also makes me wonder how does the current system even produce anything worth of significance given the lacklustre incentives. Finally, FWIW, yes the topic is computer science: the IP restrictions do not concern any other subject.
There's a dark side here - and the common refrain of "if paid for with public money, it should be in the public domain" - of normalizing the power of capital holders compared to the people doing the work. Most of the time, that idea is going to have bad public outcomes, so I don't like playing into it with regard to journals and research publications.
The net result was a massive loss of bright researchers, massive churn and the death of pretty much any promising research endeavor (it's hard to do great research on a 2 years contract already, but doing so without infrastructure...).
The administration also started to push aggressively for this idea that we should try to apply for patents in anything that seems even vaguely applicable, and in order to keep the financing going the center had to sign a contract that "guarantees an increased in throughput of 2% every year", where the throughput is measured in pubblications. Again, this requires no explanation for whoever has worked in research, but for the others: it's impossible: it just promotes lower and lower-quality of output in order to meet the criteria, until it will bust.
This also gives an idea how the center and the local administration fail to understand how research work on a basic principle.
The local group has started to apply aggressively for more and more EU grants (which are the only one that can provide vaguely sustainable research), which in turn resulted in staff doing less research and much more grant writing. We now have staff whose purpose is doing just that.
Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.
It is closely related to a shift in the definition of "what purpose should academia serve?"
Basically, old-school academia had the government pay a lot of money to universities to do general research and educate students to be researchers, and then the military paid more money for research that could be usable for military purposes (encryption, rocketry, nuclear). Training of new employees was paid for by the companies themselves (e.g. apprenticeships).
Nowadays, governments have massively cut general research budgets (leaving universities and research to the mercy of grantors aka the free market), the military is running its own show (aka the MIC sucks in enormous amounts of money and puts it into private coffers), and companies have outsourced training and vetting of new employees to universities and the payment for all of that to the students in form of student loans, which means that universities are no longer primarily a place of research but of schooling.
It's a real disgrace what happened over the last decades, and the Western world will pay badly for this since China does not follow this turbo-capitalist ideology.
He presents two alternatives for "what is the purpose of academia?" that date back to the 19th century and earlier. On the one hand, is the "German" approach, of "the great encyclopedia of knowledge", where the universities steward research for its own sake, to discover truths about the world. The other hand is the "French" approach, where the goal of the university was to produce well-rounded, educated citizens. He argues that both of these goals are effectively obsolete, and what now matters is "performativity", i.e. producing "value".
My sense is that the immense military funding signals the initial shift, especially since the fundamental nature of the university changed so much as a result of mass admissions after the GI bill. No longer was it a sort of "special" place for intellectuals; now everybody goes to college, so these older, more "romantic" goals become problematized.
Universities realized that they had a blank check in the form of student loans. Enticing students to study philosophy at $40k a year is a little difficult when there are no job prospects to pay back that loan.
So how do you get students to pay obscene tuition? Make the product appear to have good ROI. This is when universities started altering core curriculums and created new degrees to cover more applied topics that are useful for employment.
Businesses actually don’t care that much about college education (in SWE hiring it’s only relevant when the candidate has approximately no experience). This tide of shitty, expensive university was entirely brought on by the universities wanting to sustain obscene tuition growth.
This has nothing to do with businesses dumping training onto universities. This is purely greedy universities pretending they are a blessed training path to a good job to justify a price.
This is especially true for students, which are paying money to go somewhere and then suddenly also need to give up their IP.
And before anyone says "stipend" I'd like to point out that someone who could work in industry but is instead spending an additional couple years doing research is incurring a heck of an opportunity cost.
Also regarding IP, I'm not sure about the US, but in all the countries I've worked in students retain their IP. In fact looking at some online sources this applies also to the US.
It has recently become popular here on HN to bash universities, but at least keep it factual.
My favorite audio language, pure data, was created after IRCAM kept the IP for max/msp - if I recall correctly. This seemed to motivate the author, miller puckette, as he seemed to form an ethos of accessibility. Now pure data is supposed to have a ~25 year support cycle along with mit/bsd licensing. Ableton, a german company, bought max/msp after a few decades of it being on its own.
In Sweden there is something called the teachers exemption which means even university teachers (as employees) will own their own IP, which is unusual (I think Italy has a similar provision).
For students they will in general own their own IP, that applies to graduate and undergraduate students.
The same rules for students apply to Australia and New Zealand, although there it depends on the scholarship/financing for graduate students. For large projects who finance PhD scholarships there is often a provision that IP is owned by the university (the same as employees), because there would often be a large number of co-inventors on patents for example. If there is to be some commercialisation you essentially want to avoid co- or unclear ownership.
For Germany I believe undergraduate students own their own IP, but graduate (PhD) students are typically university employees, so I'm not sure about the rules for them.
I've been told by university admin, that in general university agreements claiming rights on student IP would violate the law in most countries in Europe, because they would be agreements with a one-sided benefit, i.e. the student gives something up without getting something in return. This essentially the same reason why non-competes are generally not valid in Europe either, unless you are being paid while you can't work.
If you want to make it closed source/proprietary and sell it, then the university wants license fees (but you get a cut of those fees, so it's sort of a kickback scheme, but the university picks the fee and there is a set percentage that you get.)
It's super frustrating to work in higher education right now because the focus of every student is 'what job can this get me'.
Maybe I'm just old. Maybe I'm just burnt out. Who knows.
You can't just handwaive or long-sigh this away...you have to have concrete, realistic, and actionable answers to these questions....otherwise you are literally just complaining about children wanting to survive
or may be some just have lost their sight about what is really important and why academia exists in the first place.
That's actually disgusting.. They're supposed to be teaching you, not using you for free labour. They got their cut when you paid for the course..
In the US, you're looking at paying $20-50k/year, and while most students will get tuition waivers and small stipends, those often disappear if you do any contracting or work on the side to supplement your meager income.
Meanwhile, $100-150k is a reasonable starting total comp right out of school, especially after the recent rash of inflation. And a good worker can realistically double that in the 4-6 years that it would take to get a PhD.
So the opportunity cost is staggering, but wait - there's more. The job market for tech positions has been very hot for the past decade, and the global economy is on the verge of a rebound. If you want to learn about a specific field like ML or aerospace, you can just get a job in that field. Kids graduating today have the option of learning from talented and driven people while earning a reasonable salary.
Research certainly has its place; most of the work that we do is based off of concepts that were pioneered decades ago. But from the perspective of a prospective student in the 2020s, it's a hard sell.
Especially since the current advisor/advisee relationship is rife with perverse incentives. This whole wall of text assumes the best case scenario, where you don't end up in a toxic lab.
I've seen some of my smartest friends stagnate to the point of being 9-10th year phds without the ability to navigate the job market. These are people at places like MIT and Caltech.
One of my regrets was turning down an offer at a FAANG to go to grad school in 2014. I finished up in 2020 and couldn't even land an interview despite having a pretty good publication/open-source track record. My advisor was no help on the job market, I felt kicked to the curb.
Took me 1 year to find a job (backend engineer) and I'm still grappling with the fact that I wasted my 20's doing a PhD when I could've at least enjoyed life a little bit more and had a bit of a financial cushion. Honestly, being a swe in industry is a vacation compared to the uncertainty and workload during the phd.
Both students were not employees of Volvo, but still forced to register the system to Volvos internal system for innovation and got 122 000 SEK (15 k $).
2014 they got help from Swedish engineers for a lawsuit towards Volvo cars about 8,7 million sek/student (around 1 million $) for the system (about 3% of the worth of the sales system). Now the lawsuit was drawn back and they did meet on a secret sum from the company and both are today employees of Volvo.
With that said, from what I can see the Academia/Chalmers did not try to take any % of the cut.
Link to the article: https://www.gp.se/ekonomi/volvo-g%C3%B6r-upp-om-miljontvist-...
Link to Swedish engineers: https://www.sverigesingenjorer.se
It's quite funny that so many here are claiming universities are claiming student IP, but one of the main cases we find is of a company trying to claim IP without paying.
I'm just wondering where the patents in this pool are coming from, I assume the administrators are not going through the research papers and file new patents on the researchers' behalf?
Your assumption is correct in my experience. Despite the thread starter's somewhat unusual take, it's more of a system based on rewarding inventors with a cut of license fees to incentivize them to submit invention disclosures. Then the school's IP office determines if it wants to pursue a patent on the invention disclosure or not. And open source projects are often part of the grant itself, especially in fields like CS and statistics, so a professor could specifically choose to produce them.
On the other hand though, if a grad student's goal is to take their school project and sell it themselves somehow subsequently, the school might actually own the rights. So this might cause problems at some point with getting funding.
Project ownership was part of the reason I left acadamia.
I conceived, carried out, and kept 2 projects funded over 6 years that ended up in nature and science. I was elated by the pubs. A few months later a colleague I worked with asked me why I wasn't in the patents and I though, what patents? My advisor took out patents on the ideas and cited the papers in the patents without my knowledge. I didn't argue for the sake of leaving with a phd and the probability that those patents would yield financial benefit.
The whole thing left me disillusioned with acadamia...I'm much happier in industry.
I think actually we haven't seen the worst of it. My theory is that the rapidly ageing demographics of the world, which it is important to note is totally unprecedented, will have profound impacts on research and life in general. Mostly, it will be less interest in and funding for research. The cost of caring for the elderly is part of it (see where government revenue goes in more socialist countries, or observe the huge pension liabilities coupled with increasing life span in the USA and some of Europe). But there could be less tangible factors, like the willingness of a more elderly society to support research which will only bear fruit long after many of them are dead. This is understandable. Society will fund as much research as it sees fit. It is hard to make an actual moral argument for funding the kind of extremely expensive, highly technical and incremental pursuit that science has become.
(Not criticizing, it can perfectly make sense - if you're going to be subject to all that capitalistic crap anyway, you might as well take the higher salary as well. Just pointing out the inherent irony in the situation).
This is still very generous. I know salaries are very low for PhD students but it is still a generous offer. I think my US university was 1/3 Uni, 1/3 Prof, 1/3 PhDs. They even handed stocks to a Post-doc with a 6 figure sum.
In an company you may get nothing or very very little.
Wiki: "In United States, however, an employee may have to sign over the rights to an invention without any special compensation. Germany has a law on employees' inventions providing strict rules concerning the transfer of rights to an invention to the employer. It also prescribes mandatory compensation of employees for inventions they make."
What is worse, that in some countries this also covers invention, unrelated to your field of employment. Wage-slave I guess.
More esoteric professors were replaced with more efficient manuscript machines submitting manuscripts to more prestigious journals. Soon after the layoffs, the university's innovation and commercialization services became extremely active. Recurring events at lecture rooms where we were blasted on how our work is IP of the university, how the university takes only 50% cut if something works, how cool is it to be a researcher who commercializes ideas in comparison to being one those dusty farts in the science cave studying one protein or butterfly for their entire life.
Being a believer and practitioner of open source, I once asked how does this all this apply to computational science. Basically all algorithms and tools should be passed through them to see if they have commercial potential - if no, we can go ahead. Found it appalling and interfering with my intellectual freedom, one of the many events that made me pursue life outside the academia.