Lilia, a recent Master's graduate from here at the iSchool, recounts her frustrating experience with her Master's project, her adviser and intellectual property associated with her project: "An Unfortunate Graduate School Experience".
Lilia and her counsel are spot on about the joint works issue; each author has the ability to do what they want with the materials they produced for their final project. And the blurring of the academic, business and other roles of the students and the adviser is a particularly ill-advised arrangement. However, how the hell is a group of students going to be able to know if they have a marketable product from the beginning? If they would have known that from the beginning, they would have done many things differently and surely would not be in this state where, presumably, the other students are fine with this sub-standard arrangement and the one student who questions things is fired.
Undoubtedly, this follows many of the smaller disputes we see in the intellectual property space: it's not about the intellectual property but about control and, in some sense, the dispute itself. We need to be able to work things out... and everybody has to give a little to allow that to happen.
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