Student IP (follow up)

Matthew has written his own summary of the debate at his blog here.

Regardless of the legal issues, the crux of the issue to me is why Media Departments want to have copyright in student works. I can only think of three possible reasons:

(a) Because they believe that to be the law. However, given the tendency of the staff in these institutions to dismiss legal arguments as to why this isn't the case, I really don't think it has anythinh to do with the law.

(b) As a form of promotion for the media department. I don't believe this either. UTS doesn't pretend to exert ownership over its student works, it merely requires them to put 'produced at University of Technology Sydney' at the end of the films. That seems to be a far more fair, and legal, approach to promotion. So I don't this is the reason. This leads me to:

(c) Its about power over the students. Its about making the students feel like they 'owe' the Department something and when they win money, they should give it to the Department (as a friend was asked to do by Macquarie). Thankfully, when we won the $15K for the Gardener, I had already done all this research and given it to the Department... They said NOTHING to us about either the winning of the Nescafe Short Film Awards nor about the money they would have loved to have. In stead, they hit someone for the $800 they were paid to be screened on the ABC. Pathetic.

I'm willign to accept other possibilities - but I can't think of any.

Incidentally, Matthew Clayfield e-mailed his course convenor who claimed that: ""most universities require students to assign copyright to the university but opinions at Bond differ".

Hmm.

Bond University gives ownership to the student and requires a specificed agreement to overrule thatResearch Guidelines

UNSW claims ownership in a number of very specific cases, but provides a number of exceptions including 'creative works': see Section 3.1 and 3.5 of their Intellectual Property Policy

University of Sydney does not claim ownership in Student works generally but requires an actual contractual assignemnt to gain IP: see Division 3 (s6) of the University of Sydney (Intellectual Property) Rule 2002

Similarly, University of Western Sydney of doesn't claim IP generally but to obtain it will use specified agreements. See Rule 2.5 of their Intellectual Property Policy. Specifically they say that: "In accordance with conventions in the university community for many years, the University will not claim ownership of copyright in scholarly works." So, according to at least one University, its a convention to NOT claim IP. Hmm.

The University of Melbourne in their policy on Student Intellectual Property at 2.2 states that "A student at Melbourne [university] automaticlly owns any intellectual property they create pursuant to their studies unless IP ownership is governed in some way by a third party agreement.

Thats enough for the time being.