The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship in Van Munching Hall.
A University of Maryland Senate bill plans to update the university’s intellectual property policies for the first time since 2003 to create a less complex system that gives more rights to faculty members, senate officials said.
The bill’s goal is to provide faculty and employees more power and ownership over publications, inventions or work they create at the university or with school resources, said Patrick O’Shea, vice president of research and a member of the senate’s Intellectual Property Committee. The committee aims to provide a policy that is easier for people in the “entrepreneurship ecosystem” to understand, he said.
The Senate Executive Committee voted Sept. 17 to put the policy in motion to the University Senate, where various campus representatives are scheduled to vote on it at an Oct. 7 meeting. The bill itself will be released publicly Sept. 30, University Senate Director Reka Montfort said.
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If passed, the policy will be cut from 39 to eight pages, O’Shea said. The new version does not remove any rules, he said, but greatly cuts down on the bill’s language to simplify it.
“Overall, our ecosystem is much more supportive and friendly of the commercialization” of intellectual property, O’Shea said.
The senate’s Research Council began to review the policy in 2011, but as new laws and university changes occurred, it had to update its policy. One of those changes was a major Supreme Court Case, Stanford v. Roche, that gave faculty and professors a greater right to their work, said Aaron Nisenson, a senior council member of the American Association of University Professors.
Intellectual property laws are often complex because they must cover both copyright, which pertains to publications and written works, and patents, which protect physical creations, Nisenson said.
While universities have often provided student and faculty copyrights, patents are “really all over the map,” he said, and policies involving them vary from school to school. Early this year, Ohio State University’s attempt to change its intellectual property policy was met with controversy when professors said they lost some of their ability to commercialize their work.
Some changes are necessary to this university’s intellectual property policy for the sake of clarity, O’Shea said. In the 2003 edition, poor wording meant staff members’ rights were not properly accounted for because it only mentioned faculty and students — not administration or other employees. The newer version would fix this, he said.
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“If someone is legally an inventor, then they are legally an inventor, whether they are staff or faculty,” O’Shea said.
The update also would give professors ownership of online courses, he said.
Student rights have always been a much simpler issue, O’Shea said. In the older version, students had complete control of their creations; they will continue to have full control in the new policy.
“We do not want to interfere with the students,” O’Shea said. “We believe they should have as much freedom as possible to do what they want.”
