Intellectual Property on Campus: Students' Rights and Responsibilities

2. Legal Effects of Student Collaborative Efforts

34 2 Legal Effects of Student Collaborative Efforts Beyond their individual efforts on projects within academic settings, students also work collaboratively with other students; their professors; corporate, government, or private-project contributors from outside the academy; and, at times, administrators. Their potential to control the intellectual products they develop is dependent on the context of the way in which their contributions are created. Technical communication pedagogy has long supported collaboration among students in the classroom. Early research in teaching through collaboration made use of Mary Lay and William Karis’s now classic Collaborative Writing in Industry as a basis from which to build. And currently, extensive sources treat collaboration among students, including James Dubinsky’s Teaching Technical Communication , Stuart Selber’s Computers and Technical Communication: Pedagogical and Programmatic Perspectives, Cynthia Selfe’s Resources in Technical Communication: Outcomes and Approaches, and Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie’s Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers, among a host of other books and articles. Because collaborative work is central to student activities in technical communication, as it is in student work in other fields, it is important to note the potential for legal questions as they relate to collaboration. Areas of law that apply in cases of collaborative development are joint work, work for hire, and contracts. But numerous extralegal factors also affect the ways in which student work is treated in educational settings and +HUULQJWRQ&KLQGG $0 L E G A L E F F E C T S 35 can ultimately have a more powerful effect than the law does. This chapter considers how student contributions are treated within the academy and examines conceptual understanding that grounds actions regarding student work. It also explains the legal effects of joint work, work for hire, and contracts on student work projects. Students often work closely with faculty members, with each other, and sometimes with their institutions in the capacity of employees. When more than one author creates a work, as would be the case in these collaborative situations, participants will develop a “joint work.” The joint work issue can create particular difficulty in academic settings, where students work closely with professors to create projects that range from those in which students develop a substantial amount of work and provide important substantive ideas, to those in which students provide rote materials and have no creative input in determining the content or outcome of the final product. And in cases where students receive such benefits as work-study funding or tuition waivers, the authorship, and thus copyright ownership, of a work can be difficult to determine. Students may look to university policies to help determine a basis for how their work may be treated, and they may refer to contracts that they create within the organizational units within their universities. Students’ contracts should be available on file within their departments, schools, colleges, or university offices, and guidelines are usually posted in university handbooks, available online within university Web sites. The complexity of the situation in which students operate as workers, as well as students, is compounded by unequal power relationships between students and professors. As noted earlier, in the description of studentprofessor relationships in patent product development, professors often provide access to potential employers through long-developed connections and are sources for recommendation letters and evaluation of students’ work that can affect their lives both during and after their educational careers. The differing roles of students in collaborative activities can affect legal characterization of the work that they produce, so it is important that both students and professors understand the potential impact of the work practices they undertake. Joint Works Students who work with other students, professors, teams, organizations, administrators, or individuals outside the academy and combine their contributions into single intellectual products create joint works. The base concept behind joint work is that multiple parties create an intellectual +HUULQJWRQ&KLQGG $0 L E G A L E F F E C T S 36 product with parts that are sufficiently merged so that the product as a whole cannot be represented without all its parts. For instance, the film Finding Nemo is copyrighted as a whole even though it contains multiple different elements produced by hundreds of authors. The film includes the graphics that represent the characters, the actors’ voice work, the musical score, and the computerized movements...