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Comment by MrScruff | Hacker News Reader

From the OP

'Sadly though, due to concerns from my employer regarding intellectual property and similarities in projects I've worked on, I've been asked to take down the site.'

We have no way of assessing the validity of these concerns from what has been said. If the company feels the open source project contains work they have funded, and don't want to release, then it is their right to ask him to withdraw it.

Also, unless Nick is primarily driven by open source participation there's nothing to say they will eventually lose him.

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People aren't arguing that it's illegal or incorrect for them to take it down, or that they don't have the authority here. They are arguing that it's a stupid move.

Nobody argued that it is not their right. Of course it is, or Nick would have left it up at Github. It's their right, but it's not "right".

I think it's more of a grey area than that. Certainly I can imagine a situation where the overlap was insignificant and this was an overreach by the employer, but there is currently no evidence to suggest that.

One could also say that in this case, Nick should have discussed this with the employer. It seems as if he was aware he should have, and by not doing so, the situation is no worse off than it would have been.

It's also possible that they (he and his employer) performed the "related work" on commission and have signed over IP rights to a client. In this case, open sourcing the work would expose them to liability from the client.

Was he also asked by his employer to take down his "final year university project" that this was supposed to be? That sounds a little bit incongruous to me. Or was the "final year university project" also somehow related to his job output preceding in the creation of said final year project?

The IP of my final year (UK) university project belongs to the University not me, and not to the company that was sponsoring me for my final year.

Are you sure? I employ PhD students to work on commercial products and there is a strict rule in the university that any work done by the student is owned by the student. We are granted an irrevocable, fully transferable licence to use their work, but the student is not locked out from doing whatever they like with the stuff that they did. I'd be surprised if that was not the same for undergraduates - although I am aware that university boards are becoming very greedy with respect to I.P.

In North America, that is an atypical arrangement. Here in Canada, Waterloo is unique for being one of the few (only?) schools that doesn't claim IP ownership. My university (Manitoba) does, although it is negotiable and for commercially sponsored projects the sponsoring company generally owns the IP.

EDIT: From personal experience, I can also tell you that IP policies are less clear at the undergraduate level around here.

In California it is more complicated. First there is copyright law -- students and academic personal manual employees own their copyright. The Education code limits how public university students may share notes (a matter of conduct, not copyright). Non-academic personal manual appointments have copyright owned by the university. Students who are not also otherwise employed by the University would own their patents (subject to any details of their non-university employment agreement). Anyone employed by the university (student, academic or staff) get to keep a cut of their patents; but have to share it with the university.

I was pretty sure this policy of students/academics own their own copyright but share in patents was the standard in United States higher education.

Correct--where I said "IP" above, I should really have said "patents/patent rights". Copyright, to my understanding, becomes more of an issue when publishing, as some (most?) journals are greedy in that regard, but I haven't had to cross that bridge yet.

What you're describing sounds pretty similar to the way it works here, but the gross majority of full-time graduate students in engineering are employed by their universities (as "research assistants" or similar) and thus effectively waive their patent rights.

(FWIW, I think it's great for schools to share in patents which originate within them, but I would like to see students and staff be more well-informed on the subject, and commercialisation efforts which span beyond a single industry--I know of very few schools which have accomplished that.)

That just shows how ridiculous the laws in UK/US are. Around here, what you're describing would be expressly against the law.

It would be helpful if you were more specific than just "Around here".

.cz

I think it's about the same thing in Sweden (the student has the rights).

At the sime time, there are two different rights; copyright and "usage right" (not sure if that last thing is translated correctly), which means that you own the stuff you've created, but you can transfer the right of using it to someone else.

Even if you are a fully paid scholar at univ? I mean not even a penny in scholarship at an institution? I don't think it will be such an umbrella rule. Is it?

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