If you design a hit product in school…does the school own your intellectual property?
The 2016 grade4-5 British Columbia ADST curriculum asks students to
- use market research to identify a consumer need
- build a product to satisfy the need
- improve it and
- market it
This list reads to me like “build a hardware business 101”. How I wish I’d had that class in HS! Glad to see this is required learning for young entrepreneurs.
…and yet…
I notice there’s something important missing. There’s no mention of Intellectual Property (IP) or IP rights anywhere. Picture this: a nine year old girl with a hit product. The next Super Awesome Sylvia, right? The next Limor Fried. She has a perpetual money machine and being a nine year old she’s got the cute factor to go viral. Only… only her classes didn’t include anything about Intellectual Property rights. HungryWolfCompany has been watching for good ideas and sees SuperFried’s early blog posts about her project. They quietly file a patent just different enough to not be prior art. Eighteen months later when she takes it to KickStarter they sue her for violating HungryWolfCompany’s IP rights!
The first time this happens and HungryWolfCompany obtains the rights (as well as the product), the schools say to themselves: “Let’s protect the kids. Any student who invents a thing while attending our school automatically grants ownership of that thing to our school. We have the experience and the deep pockets to protect it. We’ll put it in the fine print when they sign up for the schools. It’s for the kids.”
In the USA, The Bayh-Dole Act[1] of 1980 gave intellectual property rights in federally funded inventions to universities. So in a sense, this has already begun.
