At this year's GDC, after my speech on distance education vs. brick and mortar, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a panel presentation "rant". This rant was on the educational front and had a lot of interesting information, but I noticed that everyone was steering clear of the 10,000 pound elephant in the room: the issue of students and their rights (or lack thereof) to the IP (intellectual property) they create in school. Thinking about this I realized it might be a good idea for me to post my rant on this subject.



I have been a professional educator since 1998 and am still designing, producing (and shipping) games commercially to this date. Prior to 1998 I was a designer and head of production on over 24 titles for 12 years. Essentially, I am saying I have been on both sides of the fence, with enough scar tissue that I think I have a perspective that has enough validity to be at least put out there to discuss.



For as long as I have been in education this topic has been touched on continually (via IGDA SIGs, blogs, and articles) without a consistent rationale to students and educators on how academic institutions are shooting themselves in the foot if they are not at least actively discussing either a pathway to releasing the IP to their students or alternatives that allow the students to do what they want with their intellectual property.



From the legal perspective there have been several good reviews of this subject -- most notably Mona Ibrahim's exhaustive evaluation of the subject -- so what I want to rant on is not focused on any one specific academic institution, but rather from a more global perspective my observations and some suggestions on what to do. This is essentially to hopefully serve as a catalyst for other academics to also chime in and hopefully generate additional suggestions and perspectives.



Traditionally the "pro-retention of IP rights" schools have relied on one particular point for why they require retention of the rights: the involvement of faculty with students on the projects. Their stance is that they cannot remove or in any way figure out how to separate the instructors' input from the student project, and therefore the instructor would require a percentage of the royalties and screen credit for their involvement.



Faculty that was focusing on inserting themselves in a certain capacity into a student project isn't actually doing what their focus should be on (the education), but rather piggybacking on the students' work for project credit. On a personal note I find this to be rather appalling because as a professor I am being paid by the school to teach.



What I give away is therefore essentially "intellectual freeware", and the prospect of me seeing any additional compensation is laughable. If I want credit or a royalty stream, I will moonlight and create products on my own hardware with my own software away from the campus. Any instructor that would actually take a stand like this and try to be financially part of a student project is exploiting their students.

