iPhone app raises questions about who owns student inventions

Source The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 31, 2011 0 Comments
Donald W. Reynolds, Reynolds Journalism Institute, RJI, Futures Lab
"iPhone App Raises Questions About Who Owns Student Inventions," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2011.

An iPhone app designed by a team of students for a contest at the University of Missouri at Columbia has helped lead the institution to rewrite its intellectual-property policies.

Members of the student competition, hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, had been informed that the university might assert a partial or complete claim to the products that the students were creating. That led some students to drop out, said Anthony Brown, then an undergraduate in the department of journalism.

Mr. Brown and his team, made up of fellow students Zhenhua Ma, Dan Wang, and Peng Zhuang, decided to stay in, despite their concerns. When they won the competition with an app called NearBuy, the students decided to contact the university to assert their ownership and to ask the university to waive any intent to assert ownership.

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