Who Owns Your Ideas?

by Scott Mitchell POWERFUL CORPORATIONS, the high cost of research and communication tools like the Internet have the potential to destroy academics' right to control their own ideas, warned speakers at an intellectual property conference at the University of California at Berkeley. The conference, held in early-November, questioned whether intellectual property will become "The Next Ivory Trade." Participants scrutinized "the crisis" currently preoccupying university and research officials across the United States. More than 100 delegates attended from UC campuses, Stanford University and a number of East Coast institutions. Richard Scheffler, chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, the group that co-sponsored the conference, said he believes technological progress will fundamentally alter faculty members' control over their ideas. "We decided that the time was ripe for a conference," Scheffler said. "Advances in computing and communications technologies, as well as new management philosophies in higher education, are making unprecedented changes to our roles as university faculty." According to Scheffler, one of the main problems facing faculty members is a potential loss of academic freedom caused by interaction between private corporations and public universities. "The influx of private money to university budgets poses specific challenges to faculty members' intellectual property rights," he said. "Economic considerations may lead those sponsoring research to suppress unwelcome results, reserve the right to delay or edit publications, and insist that faculty sign non-disclosure agreements, all of which effectively deprives faculty of their traditional authority to take full advantage of their research." As a number of conference delegates and speakers pointed out, this threat to academic freedom and intellectual property ownership is most noticeable in the fields of biological and genetic science. Scheffler cited a five-year research agreement between the Novartis Corporation and the UC Board of Regents on behalf of UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources. "Of particular concern (is) Novartis's influence over research (in the college) and the company's proprietary interest in a share of the research resulting from the collaboration," Scheffler said. Another concern voiced by several conference delegates was the difficulty in determining the point at which an academic's idea becomes the property of the university. Jason Owen-Smith, from Stanford's School of Education, recently conducted a study on university rules concerning intellectual property ownership. He said each university takes a different stance on the separation of private and university rights to control an idea, theory or product. "I can't give people a general rule applicable to all universities, because each research institution draws the line in a slightly different spot," he said. "At one extreme, there is a public university--not in California--which, in its employment contract, states that every concept developed while in the employ of the university is automatically owned by that university." Owen-Smith said such provisions, and similar ones that appear in a number of university employment contracts, are not fully understood by many faculty members. "If you're a chemist, and you think of a new, beneficial chemical combination totally unrelated to your employment while you're in the shower, you still have to hand it over," he said. "You probably wouldn't need to for a wooden toy you built in your garage, but if it was a design you could market, you still might have to declare it to university authorities, and then they could do what they want with it."