Relevant articles from the Times Higher Education Supplement

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Not Broke - Don't Fix It

(published 9th August 2002)

Insurrection is brewing at Cambridge University over proposals to take
ownership of almost all the intellectual property generated by its
faculty. From January 2003, our patents, copyrights and design rights
will be controlled by university bureaucrats rather than by us. The
Department of Trade and Industry lurks behind the change.

Staff will be affected in different ways. In my case, I expect to have
difficulty releasing software into the public domain, and maintaining
software I've already released. This is because Bill Gates, our
largest individual benefactor, hates free software. He considers it
iniquitous that tax money collected from Microsoft should be paid to
academics who write software and give it away, often in competition
with Microsoft. I can understand his point of view, but so long as I
own the the code I create, I can happily ignore it. Once the copyright
to all software written in the university is controlled by a single
bureaucrat, though, things may change.

Nor will the effect be limited to computer scientists, physicists,
economists and others who use software to communicate our work. The
university proposes to take ownership of material such as lectures
that it has commissioned.
 
The heart of the matter is patent rights. Cambridge (like MIT and
Stanford) allows faculty members to keep the patent rights to ideas,
except where specific grant funding or commercial contracts impose
other conditions. This liberal regime has been critical in spinning
out large numbers of high-tech companies. Study after study has shown
a positive correlation between faculty incentives and success at
technology transfer.

But if the DTI gets its way, Cambridge will change at a stroke from
having one of the most liberal IP regimes in the UK to one of the most
locked-down. The new rules will treat all our ideas as if they had
arisen in the course of a government-funded project, and will extend
control from patent to copyright too. Moral rights are at issue as
well as money; many academics want a veto on who our inventions or
software get licensed too, and although some US universities allow
this, it is not on offer to us.

The proposal is anchored in the government's recent science strategy,
_Investing in Innovation_. The government argues that as many UK
universities get most of their income from the Higher Education
Funding Council for England, every university should own all the
research done on its campus, on behalf of the taxpayer.

There are significant consequences from this for industry as well as
for academic freedom. When Tony Benn was secretary of state for trade
and industry, he destroyed Britain's computer industry by
nationalising it and consolidating it into ICL. Now his successor
Patricia Hewitt seems on course to destroy the "Cambridge Phenomenon".
Just as ICL staggered on for years and still exists after a fashion,
so the cluster of computing and biotech companies around Cambridge
will still sort-of exist in 20 years' time. But something magic, and
vital, will have gone. Cambridge will no longer attract, or retain,
many leading scientists who are passionate about turning their
research to practical use.
 
What is to be done? There is a good chance that we can defeat the
measure when it comes to be endorsed by the Regent House, Cambridge's
community of scholars, and we're told there is a fair chance we might
even beat it in the courts. But if we just throw out the measure, the
bureaucrats would keep on coming back. The rent-seeking reflex is too
strong. Instead, we plan to make an amendent when it reaches our
Regent House so as not only to reject the Great IP Robbery, but to
roll back the bureaucrats. We will introduce internal competition into
technology transfer.

Most Cambridge academics belong to a college and a department as well
as to the university, and most would prefer the institutional share of
externally-funded research income to go to one or the other rather
than to the bureaucrats. Some colleges are already active at
technology transfer: Trinity and Johns have world-famous science
parks. Some departments are active too. The seeds for a more diverse
and effective regime are already sprouting. Empowering the colleges
will also provide a useful counterweight to an overweening centre.

We therefore propose that everyone should have a choice. Every
academic (and postdoc, and student) who has an idea that must be
institutionally held, as a condition of grant funding, should be able
to do a deal with the university, or a department, or a college, as
they see fit. The government claims to believe in the theory of
contestable markets; so it will be interesting to see if they have the
gall to object.

Ross Anderson, reader in security engineering at Cambridge University


(This is the original version. The one they published was watered down
somewhat - they said after handwringing from their lawyers. It changed
criticism of `university bureaucrats' to `the university', while Bill's
hatred of free software became `apparent' - which seems bizarre as the
recent Branson libel case established that remarks on a public person's
state of mind are fair comment rather than matters of fact that have to
be proven.)


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Cambridge row over rights plan

Phil Baty
Published: 02 August 2002

Cambridge academics have pledged to scupper "unacceptable" plans by
the university to make them hand over their intellectual property
rights.

In a report this week, Cambridge's governing council and general board
recommend that the university change its rules to ensure that it owns
"all intellectual property generated by its employees in the normal
course of their duties".

But staff say that ending the current ad hoc arrangements could ruin
Cambridge's uniquely creative atmosphere, stifle innovation and
demotivate staff.

Ross Anderson, a reader in security engineering, said: "We are going
to stop this and it doesn't matter what it takes. It is an
unacceptable change to our contracts of employment."

David Mackay, a reader in natural philosophy, said: "One of the
reasons I accepted a job here was that Cambridge had a reputation for
flexibility and allowing people to do what they want with their
ideas."

Under the new policy, which is similar to rules adopted at Oxford
University, staff and students will have to disclose inventions and
give away rights to intellectual property from "work carried out using
university facilities but with the assistance of funding from the
Higher Education Funding Council for England and other university
funds".

The university would own all intellectual property created after
January 2003. Any income generated by the exploitation of ideas would
be split between the inventor, his or her faculty and the
university. When the income from inventions rises above 100,000, it
would be split into equal thirds. With smaller sums, the inventor
would receive the lion's share.

Currently, the university claims only the intellectual property
generated by academics with external grant funding.

The report says that this position causes confusion. It says that
without the specialist advice they will receive under the new policy,
academics may be vulnerable to "predatory external parties".

A new clear policy would also enable those less entrepreneurially
minded dons "to realise the value of their inventions".

The report acknowledges that many staff believe the current position
has been beneficial, leading to the "Silicon Fen" phenomenon, where
the university has attracted a cluster of high-tech businesses.

It has also led "to the university's ability to attract and retain
academic staff".

But the report says that "this rationalisation is unprovable" and that
"policy based on assertion and belief is hard to justify".

Dr Anderson said: "They claim that the link between the liberal
intellectual property rules and our success at technology transfer is
unprovable, yet it took me only a modest amount of work to find two
papers that show a positive correlation between faculty incentives and
the success of technology transfer."


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Leader: Cambridge must do its bit if it wants a piece of action


Published: 02 August 2002

The contract between universities and academics has often involved low
pay and ill-defined responsibilities. But one of the minor perks was
the off-chance of vast wealth from some invention or discovery that
might arise from one's research.

Now the University of Cambridge is tightening its approach and stands
to gain significant sums from major pieces of intellectual property
produced by its staff. In many ways, the deal is a good one. Academics
get most of the first 100,000 any invention brings in. Beyond that
they still get a third. In the private sector, a discovery on this
scale would bring in little more than a handshake from the boss.

But a university taking a cut of this size has to provide something in
return. The main thing it must guarantee is active management and
marketing of patents.

More significant is the objection that Cambridge's previous
free-and-easy approach to intellectual property has encouraged the
powerful innovation machine behind the new jobs and companies that
make up Silicon Fen. But if public money and a public university have
helped create this bonanza, it should be possible to keep it going if
the university knows its business and does not get too
greedy. Start-ups might even benefit from having a more solid idea of
how much it would cost them to get their big idea off the ground. An
academic whose idea is developed by the university will also expect
its insurance policies and safety systems to cover the research that
led to it, with no arguments after the fact about whether a researcher
was working for the university or not at some particular moment.

But perhaps the most ominous part of these proposals is that
university managers might be tempted to look more widely at the
semi-detached income staff are bringing in. Cambridge's plans do not
cover income from books, let alone films. Professors of cosmology and
medieval literature create few valuable patents, but, given the
chance, Cambridge would not refuse Stephen Hawking's book royalties,
while Oxford could have got many new buildings from the millions
generated by its former professor J. R. R. Tolkien.


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