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.
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.