Introducing a legal strand in the computer science curriculum

Computing graduates learn how to develop software and/or databases throughout a computing degree. Young graduates are setting up their own software companies to market their products internationally-Through the Internet, and also work as contractors. Such graduates need to not only be aware of how to protect their software by means of existing intellectual property systems, but also, how to draft a license agreement for their software, what terms can be negotiated in a software contract, and more. In this paper, we describe our experiences with the introduction of intellectual property concepts at the first year level, and the feedback received from students. We also propose a legal strand for the Computer Science curriculum1. Such a strand is of relevance to today's computing professionals and can be implemented in a variety of ways. We describe teaching methods, resources, and implementations that can be used to introduce such a legal strand in the Computer Science curriculum.