By: Corbett Gildersleve, News Writer
As recently reported by The Peak, the Senate reviewed and discussed a new draft version of its intellectual property (IP) policy solely focused on the commercialization of inventions and software. Based on community feedback, they split the IP policy into two: one for inventions and software, and the other for educational material and general IP issues. The Peak spoke with Ciaran Irwin, Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) trustee, and Derek Sahota, TSSU member representative, to learn about their thoughts on the latest updates.
Sahota said they met with Dugan O’Neil, SFU vice president research and innovation, and Kamaldeep Singh Sembi, director of technology licensing and IP legal counsel, to relay their concerns. Irwin said, “It’s nice to see that a lot of the concerns that we raised in the last policy/previous proposal have been addressed,” but “we still have issues not just with some of the aspects of this new policy, but in the process that they’re embarking on.”
When asked about their specific concerns, Irwin said that given TSSU wasn’t invited to be more involved, and with “glaring issues” like ambiguous language in the policy back in March, SFU scrapped that draft, which he deemed a “large waste of time and resources.” He added that SFU has now reworked the language in their policy and “explicitly addressed some of the issues around ownership.”
SFU told The Peak that the current timeline is for the policy to be approved by the Board of Governors on September 25. However, Irwin said “it’s hard to feel confident that all the I’s are being dotted and all the T’s are crossed.”
One of the “fundamental problems with this new model is that it silos things. It tries to put software and innovation in one bucket with one policy, and then everything else aside,” said Sahota. However, “in an interdisciplinary university, in a university with emerging technologies like generative AI, these things are connected — not in all cases, but in some,” he continued.
“You’ve got experts here, you have stakeholders at your fingertips [ . . . ] and to not leverage that resource and to not engage these folks early in the process makes no sense to me.” — Ciaran Irwin, TSSU trustee
The newest draft also recognizes that the collective agreements for TSSU and the SFU Faculty Association (SFUFA) apply, each with their own IP policies. Sahota explained that when faculty, graduate students, and staff conduct research, they need to navigate two separate IP policies and collective agreements when they have an invention. Now, when someone wants to license their invention, they’ll need to understand which policy it falls under — the SFUFA or TSSU collective agreements, the IP policy for inventions and software, or the upcoming IP policy for teaching materials that is yet to be developed. Sahota said it “is really unclear how that would play out on the ground.” He stressed these problems “need to be laid out before anything goes before the Board, because the Board needs to know what they’re actually implementing.
“I would love to see a good, effective, well-thought-out policy that’s less than 21 years old. But the problem is that the last policy process we had [in March] failed because it was rushed, they hadn’t thought it through, and they hadn’t consulted with people properly,” said Irwin. He felt that SFU was “repeating the same mistakes” this time around.
When asked about the policy process, Sahota said they asked SFU not for consultation, but for inclusion in a policy affecting TSSU’s members. “We should be the ones that are talked to first before [they] consider any changes, and be included from day one in the thought process and development of what might be a policy change.”
Irwin added, “You’ve got experts here, you have stakeholders at your fingertips [ . . . ] and to not leverage that resource and to not engage these folks early in the process makes no sense to me.”
SFU pointed to the Policy on Policies within Board of Governors Jurisdiction and Associated Procedure as support for “policy developers and all members of the university community in streamlining the policy-making process while promoting consistency and coherence across the university.” They also acknowledged, “Outside the formal policy process, we recognize that informal discussions at early stages of policy planning could be helpful for some policies. We plan to keep that in mind as we plan our policy revisions in the future.”
