UA calls Penn to 'condense and clarify' IP policy

Two weeks ago, the Undergraduate Assembly passed a resolution calling on the school to "condense and clarify" its policy on the intellectual property rights of students.

"The material is out there, but it's just really confusing for students to go through," said UA member and College freshman Cornelius Range, the proposal's main author, who estimated he spent upwards of 10 hours going through the University's IP policy in the course of writing the proposal.

Range said the proposal was prompted by discussions at last year's Ivy Council Fall Policy Colloquium, a gathering of student governments from across the Ivy League. A delegate from Cornell University brought up an incident at the school in which a professor supposedly took a student's idea and passed it off as his own.

"Although complete details of this allegation are unknown," the proposal reads, "even the remote possibility of such an instance occurring at the University of Pennsylvania should be enough to render the issue as pertinent enough to be addressed by the Undergraduate Assembly."

The current policy, Range said, is "muddled" in such a way that the administration could potentially manipulate it to take control of a student's work.

Michael Cleare, associate vice provost for research and executive director of the Center for Technology Transfer, said the situation at Cornell represented "the exception, not the rule."

Nonetheless, he said, Penn's IP policy could be clarified. When students choose to take any "formal piece of work," whether it is lab work or specific coursework, "it should be made clear to them up front what the situation is," he said.

Cleare said under the University's current policy, the administration could only lay claim to students' work in the context of a specific assignment.

"If the context isn't open-ended - in other words, you're working under a grant where the objectives have already been set and somebody else is paying for the work," he said, "you fall under the same responsibility as the professor, where you have to report the work to the University."

On the other hand, he said, if the context is "open-ended," like most coursework, students would likely retain IP rights for their work. He pointed to business plan competitions in Wharton as an example.

Cleare said there was a distinction between "inventorship" and the owner of the patent rights. "Inventorship says, 'Were you responsible for all or part of the patent claims that define the invention?'" he explained. "Who owns it is an entirely different matter."

Cleare also suggested the policy clarification give examples of different situations students could be in with regard to IP rights, estimating that six or seven of such situations existed.

Range said the proposal aims to set the terms for debate.

"We're going to wait and see what the administration gives us," he said, adding that if the clarified policy was seen as oppressive, the UA would attempt to have it revised.

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