Student Intellectual Property

As a general rule, intellectual property created and submitted in fulfillment of assignments in the Information Technology and Management degree program remains the intellectual property of the student; if no license is included, the assignments are copyrighted under the provisions of the Berne Copyright Convention and distribution is subject to ordinary copyright law. This means that there may be no redistribution or re-use of the material submitted in fulfillment of assignments without the express consent of the copyright owner—the student. Because it is necessary to maintain files of student work for normal administrative and pedagogical purposes, such as accreditation requirements, the Center for Professional Development asserts a right to retain possession of student work, but retention of student work for these purposes is not an assertion of ownership. IIT owns the answers and questions on tests and examinations, unless otherwise indicated by the course instructor. There are too many possible variations on how intellectual property may be handled for full inclusion here, but in general the following policies will apply.

Requests for Assignments of Rights
As many student projects are ongoing from term to term, and since faculty members would like to be able to present examples of superior student work, faculty members may request an assignment of rights for re-use or redistribution of student work from students, but students are not expected or required to assign any rights, and the refusal to assign rights may not be prejudicial to the student in any way. To ensure any consent granted for re-use or redistribution of any student work is clearly unequivocal, such rights must be granted in writing by the copyright owner.

• Assignment of Copyright Ownership http://www.itm.iit.edu/data/StudentIntellectualPropertyAssignment.txt
  This text document presents a format and an example of how students can assign copyright to Illinois Institute of Technology.
• Release to Display and/or Share http://www.itm.iit.edu/data/StudentIntellectualPropertyRelease.txt
  This text document presents a format and an example of how students can assign permission to display and/or share their intellectual property to Illinois Institute of Technology while retaining copyright protection over their work.

Software Licensing
While it is not required, students are strongly encouraged to license academic programing assignments under an applicable Open Source license. This is in line with the academic traditions of openess and sharing that have created Linux and the Internet. The preferred license for ITM student use is the MIT License. Alternative licenses could be the GNU General Public License (GPL) or any one of a variety of other Open Source licenses.

• MIT License for licensing of academic programing assignments http://www.itm.iit.edu/data/StudentIntellectualPropertyLicense.txt
• Open Source Licenses by Name from the Open Source Initiative at http://opensource.org/
• Various Licenses and Comments about Them from the Free Software Foundation at http://www.gnu.org/

Other Intellectual Property Licensing
Again, while it is not required, students are strongly encouraged to license research papers and other academic coursework under licenses that allow some sharing of the material such as a Creative Commons license. With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit—and only under specific conditions that you specify. For details on licensing under Creative Commons, see http://creativecommons.org/license/.

Public Domain
Students may explicitly place any coursework in the public domain by placing a comment in their code or text that reads: This [software/text/etc.] is placed in the Public Domain by the author, [student name], [date].