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.”
