This section provides details about how work products and outputs, respectively belonging to thousands of employees who have worked for, or are currently working for North American universities, have continued to be misappropriated by program managers and sponsoring agencies of R&D projects. Such projects of important concern were, or are being carried out within, on-campus and off-campus facilities of those universities.
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During the period of September-2007, to June-2009, I worked as a graduate research assistant within the Industrial Engineering department of the University of Iowa (UIowa), Iowa, USA. My work at that time mainly involved R&D of unmanned vehicles, which are popularly known as drones.
- Is this true or false? It's true.
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Due to the verbiage and content of my employment contract with UIowa, from that time period of the contracted graduate research work, it can be verified and proven that I never assigned or waived any of my intellectual property (IP) rights to any contracting or supervising entities like UIowa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and especially not to the U.S. Office of Naval Research (US-ONR). There were also no clauses in it about secrecy of items given to me as work materials for various research topics.
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Is this true or false? It is true and my employment contract is included here: long-overdue-justice/reference/files
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A copy of the above-mentioned employment contract would necessarily be available for the record, among other such employment contracts archived by UIowa. Those sets of archived documents cannot be faked because any attempts to create a fake employment contract with different terms and conditions, along with a forged signature of mine, would also require the forgers to make hundreds more of such contracts with modifications as well as forgeries of several hundred signatures, on the archived documents for hundreds of other employees who were hired, over the years, using the same template of the contract document that was provided to me.
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The responsible employer could however, deny or delay access to those employment records even against the directives of a legal warrant issued by a competent court. The responsible parties could attempt to destroy the entire dataset of such employment contracts via an "accident", or claim that the required dataset has mysteriously, gone "missing" from their archives. However, doing anything of that sort would eventually cause every piece of data along with every aspect of the record management practices of UIowa, to come under public scrutiny with overwhelming pressure for a public hearing exerted from the international community. Right now, it would appear that only IP assignment and employment contract related documents from UIowa need to be investigated, especially ones related to any kind of R&D concerning military and defense technologies.
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As a matter of fact, many other students and faculty members of UIowa never assigned or waived their moral rights, IP, and copyrights within their research work. This is because the same faulty employment contract template, that was given to me, was being used throughout the university, for multiple years. It might even be the case that the particular employment contract template with its faults, and impropriety, is still being used by various departments and centers of UIowa.
- Is this true or false? This issue concerning the IP and labor rights of students and faculty members is valid, not only for UIowa, but also for many other "Big Ten Universities" and state universities in the US, as well as for universities and colleges in Canada. Now, this issue is especially problematic for researchers who have been, or who are currently a part of the network of entities that have connections and affiliations with DARPA, from having worked on, or from currently working on DARPA sponsored projects.
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Why is any of this specially problematic and for whom? It is clear that DARPA and its administrative government bodies, are currently utilizing materials and work products that were illegitimately garnered by them, through the systematic use of faulty employment contracts, and by committing various types of infringements. Therefore, they owe royalties, fines, punitive damages, as well as compounding interests on unpaid royalties and remedies, to surviving persons harmed by such endemic malpractices and errors.
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These unresolved problems related to faulty implementation and improper management of employment contracts, among American and Canadian universities, which have continued to negatively impact tens of thousands of international students and faculty members each year, are due to a habitual violation of the moral and IP rights of respective individuals — by university administrators and their government sponsors. This is undeniably a serious legal conflict of an international-scale, and of a colossal magnitude.
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A majority of the number of individuals who have been harmed, and are owed royalties, include citizens of India, China, and Japan. The remaining groups of individuals harmed due to prevalent systemic issues impacting foreign workers in North American organizations, are citizens from dozens of countries, including but not limited to those of South and Central America, the UK, the EU, Africa, South-East Asia, and the Pan-Arabian Countries.
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However, the value of each infringed IP, and consequently, the reparations owed to each person, are drastically varied. A significantly large number of distinguishable IP are likely to be worth billions of dollars, in owed royalties and punitive damages, because of their wide-spread usages, and worldwide sales, after having been infringed upon. Others are likely to be valued as only millions or thousands of dollars, per violation, per individual IP right owner. There might even be a set of stolen IP that may seem to have no commercial or industrial worth, but that wouldn't lessen the punitive damages owed to wronged persons due to the actual, wide-scale, long-standing, mismanagement and malfeasance prevalent among North American universities concerning — IP assignments, labor rights, moral rights, and employment contracts. The cumulative value of remedies owed by offending parties due to such IP rights and copyrights violations, is naturally, in the order of tens of billions of dollars, plus compounding interests for each year of delay caused by unrepentant parties, in properly furbishing the owed remedies and penalties.
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The IP and work products thus illegitimately obtained by military conglomerates via North American universities, has made its way to the ongoing violent conflicts in places like Ukraine, Mali, Syria, and Yemen. The proliferation of such misappropriated technologies continues to violate the moral rights of its original producers. All individuals who have similarly been robbed of their IP, to then have their IP used in unlawful acts of violence or genocide, ought to be informed of their rights to obtain due justice in such serious matters.
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There is of course, no way for North American institutes to hide this massive problem, but there are other dishonorable ways that offending institutes and their governments could resort to, for misdirecting public attention away from such extensive and ongoing systemic issues. They may resort to cunning and crass tactics, all the while discrediting such reports as fallacious, or inaccurate, or untrustworthy — in order to stall any procedures that could otherwise yield legal remedies for providing justice to wronged and injured parties. Moreover, the wronged and injured parties whose respective IP were, and are being deliberately expropriated, or systematically misappropriated, happen to be spread out internationally, across the entire world.
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When considering the practicalities of addressing these kinds of legal disputes and issues, which need immediate resolution without unnecessary escalations — it becomes obvious that there isn't a simple and clean-cut way for the wronged individuals from across different countries, with varied and several types of misappropriated IP, to be collectively represented by a single legal service provider. This is precisely the kind of issue that falls outside the realm of local and regional courts of law, because of which full-scale wars have happened, and are currently ongoing in the form of "trade wars." But, perhaps, these matters can be resolved through multi-lateral and collaborative discussions leading to binding resolutions through an international court of law, or through enforceable treaties.
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Therefore, it is advisable, that the exposed institutes along with their administrating government bodies from North America, immediately come clean about their culpable and complicit activities, which have given rise to this global-scale legal conflict, in order to resolve it in peace, and in conformity with accepted civil codes of conduct.
Abbreviations:
DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (USA)
EU - European Union
IP - Intellectual Property (or Intellectual Properties)
UIowa - The University of Iowa (USA)
USA - United States of America
US-ONR - Office of Naval Research (USA)