Kahle v. AshcroftCID- Computer-based Instructional Development
originally submitted by Robert Scott Horning:
An instructional software development "authoring" system to allow multi-media instruction in a classroom setting. This software was developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education under the Secretary's Fund for the "improvement and reform of schools and teaching." The total sum of the grant was for $750,000. It was developed at Utah State Univeristy in the Department of Instructional Technology, College of Education.
Stifled uses
Robert Scott Horning:
I was the author of this software package (a work for hire) as a student researcher in the above mentioned department. This software was originally written for Windows 3.1, and for the period of time that we were under active development it was widely distributed to a number of educational institutions, including all school districts in the state of Utah. It was also published in the CD-ROM based proceedings of C.A.L.I.C.O (1995) (Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium), published by Duke University Press.
When I left school and became a professional software developer, I wanted to continue development of this software package on my own time. I even have the source code for the software (from a backup I made while I worked there). This backup was totally legitimate, and when the group disbanded I was under no contractual agreement to return the source code. Indeed, the university sold the development computer with the software still on the hard drive at an open bid auction after the equipment was surplused.
The copyright on this software is in very murky waters, as it is jointly owned by the lead professor, Utah State University, other researchers who were on the "development team", and others with a stake from the college department. I would like the opportunity to update it to more current operating systems, and since I wrote the original software, it would not be hard to do a "clean sheet" reimplementation of the software, but what rights I have as the software developer are totally unclear, or even if I could write this software. One of the researchers currently will not grant copyright on this software, even though he does not even have a copy of it.
This was a total waste of taxpayer money IMHO, except that it gave me a tremendous education regarding how software is developed "in the real world" that served me in my later career.