UW CSE OTL, or not OTL?

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As described on the "Who Owns Software" page, there are situations in which members of CSE -- particularly students -- will develop software to which they personally have ownership rights. (Note: There also are situations in which, under Federal law, you don't have personal ownership rights. It's real important to get this correct!)

If some third party desires to acquire the rights to intellectual property that you personally own, you have two options:

• You can license it to that third party as an individual
• You can turn rights management over to UW OTL and have them license

OK, so I'm just going to give you my personal advice, speaking for no one but myself (Lazowska):

This box contains Lazowska's personal opinions:

Licensing is incredibly complicated. OTL, despite what you may hear, is not in the business of trying to make money for UW. They are in the business of trying to protect student interests and advance UW's success as a major research university.

Time and again, I have seen situations in which companies try to take students to the cleaners -- probably less from ill-intent than from professional reflex action. Companies hire smart lawyers who -- totally appropriately -- view their job as getting the best possible deal for the company. Also, even faculty-founded startups hire CEO's and Boards of Directors who over time minimize the role of the faculty founders, so even if those folks have perfect intentions, their influence inevitably wanes.

Here is a snippet from a message I received from a student who went the "self-licensing" route:

I got a copy of a license in the mail, and I confess that I'm rather confused; from my reading of it, it would appear that should I agree to this:

• I have no right to use the code
• I have no right to give the code to anyone else, regardless of whether it's for academic or commercial use
• I have no right to talk about the algorithm to anyone
• I have no right to publish about it
• Anything that I should ever do in this area (be it now or 50 years from now) is owned by the company

See also "Lessons learned from a student licensing to a startup"

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to lazowska]