Hi,

In last few weeks I had a lot of problems and couldn't agree on many issues with my supervisor. We decided at some stage to rebuild our relationship but I guess it was mostly motivated by the fact that the head of our school talked to my supervisor and advised him to cool things down. Now all our conversations are recorded - my supervisor claims its for our both sakes and maybe it is true but it kind of doesn't feel we're rebuilding our relationship. Moreover he asked me to give him all my codes - I was modifying a piece of software adding (in last year) my own subroutines (codes) so we can use it for my PhD project. Now when I have good results (using this modified piece of code), I'm afraid he will use my code if I eventually decide to change my supervisory arrangements. I just want to make clear that it wasn't his processing package (unmodified version) and he didn't contribute at all to modify it. So my question is: can he use it for his research purposes or can he still my results. I know a little bit about IP rights but I'm wondering if it's him who has rights to my codes or is it university as my employer?

I'd appreciate any response

Sue

Hey Sue, I am not sure but I have heard some Uni's consider any research done under a PhD programme as their property. However, this may not be the case at your institution. If it were me, I would anonymously call the department / office which handles these issues, and ask in a very general manner who in fact owns the IP rights to a PhD candidate's research? Seems like a pretty straight forward question. If you end up owning the IP rights, then you will know how to go about protecting it.

This is an interesting question. It is one of the big paradoxes of the academic world that although it revolves around the generation of intellectual property, nobody has any idea of how that actually works.

I can tell you from experience that it is customary and will be expected from you that you hand over and relinquish all rights to everything you have produced to your supervisor. This is true of all code, data, experimental results, etc., regardless of whether he contributed to it at all. The academic custom is that you should be listed as author or in acknowledgments in the first wave of publications resulting from your contributions. After that, the supervisor may basically claim that he came up with it all by himself. The cold, hard truth is that the careers of a large portion of scientists and professors are based (at least to a certain degree) on intellectual theft. Unfortunately, if you resist this venerable tradition, you will be labeled a troublemaker. In the end, you'll lose your code, your PhD, and your career.

I was made to hand over 100k+ (not a typo) lines of C++ code which I had written during my PhD to a secondary supervisor who had in the meantime actually moved to a different university. He proceeded to publish research based on them for years - although he had not only written none of it, but for most of it he had not even provided any sort of initial research inspiration or idea.

Whether any of this is legal at all, is an entirely different question, but it is (unfortunately) the manner in which IP is handled in the academic world. This is a consistent experience I can confirm from doing research at 4 different universities on 2 continents, working under and with dozens of poeple.

If you signed any sort of contract with the university, that might contain rules concerning the handling of IP and/or the rights to code produced during a PhD. E.g., as a paid research assistant, everything normally belongs to the uni by default.

My opinion and experience concurs with Fled and Walter_Opera. It is customary for the university to own the intellectual output of your studies. This might not be mentioned explicitly to you when you join, but it is implied, and often there may be a clause in the university rules and regulations.
The same is often true of an employer, although with companies/government agencies it needs to be clearer. Having worked at a government research center, I can tell you that sometimes the policy is that ANY intellectual output - whether it is directly related to your work or not - while you are under employment belongs to your employer.