IT vendors, universities agree on collaboration

A group of IT vendors and U.S. universities have adopted guidelines for how best to collaborate on software research taking into account intellectual property issues, the organizations announced Monday. The four high-tech companies and seven U.S. universities have produced a white paper outlining what they term “free and open collaboration principles.” The main aim is to ensure that software they develop together under the guidelines can be made available free of charge for both commercial and academic use quickly and without any intellectual property hiccups.

The white paper is a result of a University and Industry Innovation Summit, which took place earlier this year at the Georgetown University Law Center. The event was cosponsored by IBM Corp. and the private Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, according to a joint release. The foundation focuses its operations and grants on two areas — education and promoting entrepreneurship.

The other IT players involved are Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp., while the seven universities are Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign and University of Texas at Austin. Also involved are the National Science Foundation, the Office of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman from Connecticut and the National Academies’ Government University Industry Research Roundtable, according to the release.

The white paper proposes a “free public commons” model for collaboration on developing software where the research will end up being publicly disseminated.

Under the terms of the model:

— Those involved in a project commit to make any patent, patent application or background copyright necessary to implement a jointly developed piece of software freely available to the public. Should a project participant be unable to do so, the company or university must make the other participants aware of the issue.

— An individual or an institution would forfeit their right to use the intellectual property from a joint project if they assert patents attacking either the project or the public commons model.

— An IT vendor or a university don’t have to surrender their intellectual property rights and aren’t prevented from selling those rights to a third party as long as the public can still access that intellectual property free of charge.

The white paper can be accessed at from the Kauffman Foundation’s Web site at http://www.kauffman.org/.