Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is a complex issue for researchers generating or using copyrighted material. This website aims to give you a brief overview of things to consider, but is in no way exhaustive. 

The UiO IPR policy

The Norwegian Copyright Act (?ndsverkloven)

The researcher's copyright to own material:

Pursuant to the Employee Invention Act, the University of Oslo may demand that the right to inventions patentable in Norway be transferred from the employee to the University of Oslo.

The general rule is that the employee owns the results of their work, for example, articles or books that under the provisions of the Copyright Act the author owns the rights to. The situation is more complex for teaching materials, but the general rule is that the employee owns the rights to teaching material that has a clearly personal style. If the employer wants to acquire the rights to the results, this must be regulated in an agreement or contract.

The use of other's copyrighted material:

Always check the copyright of the material you want to use. If you are using material available through a platform, check the rules and regulations that apply for the use of that platform's material. 

Creative Commons:

Creative Commons is a set of licenses that enable lawful collaboration to do things like copy, share and remix.  Hundreds of sites use these licenses: Wikipedia, YouTube, Archive.org, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Flickr, Bandcamp, Boundless, Jamendo, TED, Musopen, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Free Music Archive, Freesound.

YouTube video explaining Creative Commons.

(Attribution: CC BY-SA 3.0, Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation).

For lectures:

DelRett's copyright guidelines and advise for lecturing (only in Norwegian): https://delrett.no/nb/tips

Students' rights

Exploiting research results with commercial potential:

The University of Oslo has established a company, Inven2 AS, to manage exploitation of research results with commercial potential.  Inven2 AS also assesses all reported research results and, on behalf of the University, acquires the rights to results where there is potential or a possibility for commercial exploitation.  If the University chooses not to take steps to secure copyright protection and exploit the findings, the employees must be entitled to have these rights reassigned to them. 

Inven2 AS must be notified of such inventions and copyrightable materials through a "Disclosure of Invention" (DOFI), so that the University of Oslo is able to consider ownership of the invention and as applicable acquisition of the rights to them. This does not mean that in each case the University of Oslo will demand assignment of the rights to all kinds of results. When notifying Inven2 AS of an invention, an employee may point out that he or she will exercise his or her right to publish the invention without awaiting the University of Oslo's assessments, but notification of the invention must be submitted anyway. This will give you a DOFI- Disclosure of Invention

Suggested readings:

1. Open licenses: 

1.1 GNU General Public License version 2

1.2 GNU General Public License version 3

1.3 The MIT License

1.4 Apache Licenses

1.5 Open Educational Resources

PLOS Open Access publisher, innovator and advocacy organization

The Open Source guide by GitHub

TONO

Published Sep. 23, 2019 10:18 AM - Last modified June 24, 2022 12:47 PM