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1. Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 16:42:09 UTC Robert McNees

   Funny story: This was my work, patented by my supervisors at my first summer research position. They waited until I was out of the country for a gap year, and never told me they had patented and possibly even sold it.

   https://patents.google.com/patent/US5479513A/en

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 16:43:15 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     And by “funny,” I mean completely enraging. I made the diagram in the application with an early Visio-type program.

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 16:49:24 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Obviously my advisor (Protopescu) belonged on the patent just as much as me. I wouldn’t have done the work without his guidance and input! The other two names? Not so much. One was the division head, the other taught me how to use pointers in C. Neither contributed to the system itself.

     I heard that they shopped it around. Not sure if it ever sold.

   • Molly Cantrell-Kraig (mckra1g@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 16:52:08 UTC Molly Cantrell-Kraig

     in reply to

     • Sarah Burstein

     @mcnees not cool. Is there any recourse? @design_law ?

   • Alan Sill (alansill@mast.hpc.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 16:57:18 UTC Alan Sill

     in reply to

     @mcnees I was driven back to grad school from a junior scientist position partly by a similar experience. I developed and put out an internal technical note at the gov't lab where I was working describing a new technique for isolating radionuclides from each other using low-energy gamma spectrometry coincident summation with a new type of detector. The radiochemist who initially disbelieved my results published without my consent or knowledge. Decided I needed to learn to to things for myself!

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 16:57:18 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     • Alan Sill

     @AlanSill Any chance that was ORNL?

   • Prof Heino Falcke (hfalcke@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 17:43:59 UTC Prof Heino Falcke

     in reply to

     @mcnees That sounds really bad 🤔

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 17:50:46 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     • Prof Heino Falcke

     @hfalcke Maybe there was some rule about patents going to lab employees and not interns, idk. Since then, many places that run REUs have established policies that give students equal ownership rights for their work. But absent that sort of explanation, probably the most like reason to leave a student off a patent (and not tell them) is not having to pay them if it sells.

   • Prof Heino Falcke (hfalcke@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 18:24:00 UTC Prof Heino Falcke

     in reply to

     @mcnees Yep. Most likely reason…

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 18:55:04 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     • Molly Cantrell-Kraig
     • Sarah Burstein

     @design_law @mckra1g Oh of course. And it’s so far in the past, I doubt it matters.

   • Sarah Burstein (design_law@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 18:55:05 UTC Sarah Burstein

     in reply to

     • Molly Cantrell-Kraig

     @mckra1g @mcnees I can't give legal advice here. But yes, there are rules about who has to be named on a patent.

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 18:58:17 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Holy smokes! I’ve known about this for a long time, but I just learned about this article that ran in the NYT while I was out of the country! They completely leave me out, and assign invention to patent holders who didn’t do the work!

     https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0407chaos.html

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 19:06:04 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Here’s a copy of the technical report that I wrote for the project. I was told that I had to include the other names as authors for “administrative reasons.” Maddening.
     https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10109488

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2024 21:00:26 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     I actually still have a bunch of 3.5" disks (but nothing to read them with) that have all the source code, executables, drafts of the technical report, etc.

   • JustChapman (justchapman@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jun-2024 04:45:10 UTC JustChapman

     in reply to

     @mcnees Wow. Just wow.