Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms

IP Ballot - Vote for the Amendments!

See press coverage in the FT, the Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Times Higher Education Supplement (requires free trial registration) and Computing. There was also earlier coverage in Varsity, the Times Higher, and on BBC4.

See our Rebuttal of the Council flysheets, our support from the AUT and the discussion list!

Academic staff and students should have the right to decide whether and how to make research results public, subject to any agreements we have made in advance with research sponsors. However, on the 5th October, the Council proposed an IP Policy which gives the University the right to make agreements on IP with sponsors without our prior consent. There are several recent incidents that make this hard to accept.

• In 1997 the Gates Foundation made a major donation for a new Computer Laboratory building. However, it seemed that this would give Microsoft prior rights on IP generated by the department occupying the new building. The protests from staff and students when this became apparent forced a much more careful negotiation of IP relationships, which did not in the end involve prior commitment or rights on either side. (We got more money in the end too.) This was an object lesson on the unwisdom of letting the University negotiate IP on behalf of staff and students.
• There was a notorious recent case in which our Research Services Division undertook to a research sponsor that a staff member would consult for them free of charge, and would submit his relevant publications to them for pre-publication review. RSD did so without consulting the staff member beforehand or telling him of the existence of the contract for some time afterwards.
• At least one of our science/technology/medicine departments is currently negotiating a deal with a commercial sponsor which would give that sponsor first refusal on academics' inventions.

The Council proposes to settle such disputes by taking power to the centre; we propose to give power unambiguously to staff and students. The issue will be decided by a ballot during the first two weeks of December. If passed in their present form, the Regulations will also discriminate against students and against technology subjects, harm academic freedom, and have a chilling effect on entrepreneurship. We drafted a flysheet supporting the amendments. Supporters of the Council's policy circulated a number of flysheets containing arguments that misrepresent the effects of either the Council proposal, the amendments, or both. We therefore drafted a second flysheet to set the record straight. Flysheets will be circulated with the ballot papers at the end of November.

Here are the Regulations as we propose to amend them. The Council's text is in black while our amendments are in green (the italics and the black strike-outs are the changes made by the Council since the Third report was originally published; see here for their online version). The problems we're fixing are briefly as follows.

• The policy undermines academic autonomy. As noted above, it gives the University the power to enter into contracts on behalf of its staff and students without their prior informed consent (last sentence of Regulation 2). Research Services cannot on past form be trusted with such powers, and accordingly we propose amending Regulation 2 and Regulation 28 so that such agreements always require the informed prior consent of the affected staff or students.
• The policy discriminates against students, and against college fellows. Students in particular acquire extra obligations - they must give up intellectual property if a staff member claims there's competition with their own IP - and get few of the rights that staff members do. Students funded by bodies such as the UK Research Councils which stipulate that IP should normally be owned by the University will get the short end of the stick: there is no mechanism for them to automatically reclaim rights of no likely value to the University such as that enjoyed by staff under Regulation 10. This is unacceptable, and we're amending the policy so as to treat staff, students, visitors and `other relevant creators' - such as college fellows - equally. Also, where the University gets revenue from commercial exploitation of research, and a college supported the researcher, the college will get a fair share of the income.
• The scope of the right to publish is too narrow. Regulation 4 allows staff to put research in the public domain; we amend `research' to `work' to ensure that a wide range of material, from musical compositions through software to contributions to standards bodies, can be published as of right. Our other amemdments will ensure that students will always have the ability to put their work in the public domain, even where their funding body stipulates that IP should initially be owned by the University.
• The policy discriminates against technologists, and will harm economic growth. The Council's Regulation 6 removes from University staff the right to patent our ideas, which we have enjoyed for generations and which has contributed significantly to the `Cambridge Phenomenon' of high-tech startup companies commercialising University research. We propose amending it to uphold the status quo. This will also make it easier for us to raise money for our octocentenary campaign - the IP policy has already been raised as an issue by some potential donors we've approached.
• The policy undermines all academics who receive external funding. It does so by failing to take a strong enough line on funding bodies' IP rules. The UK funding councils, for example, state that IP resulting from research they pay for should belong to the University `unless stated otherwise'. The Council's draft gives the appearance of stating otherwise in respect of copyright (Regulation 28) and database rights (Regulation 10). However, close analysis reveals that these clauses are largely ineffective, being overridden in most circumstances by Regulations 2, 16 or 28. We propose, by amending these and by adding a new Regulation 40, to ensure that where the University acquires rights that are not capable of industrial application, it automatically assigns these rights back to their creators after 30 days.
• The policy maintains the claims to IP on externally-funded research made by the University since 2001. The notorious Grace no. 6 of 30th March 2001 claims all intellectual property resulting from externally funded research in the University. This sneaked through without people realising its consequences. Since then, almost all postdocs, many research students and even some research professors have had all their IP claimed, except for `normal academic forms of publication'. This casts a dark shadow over everything from their email archives, through popular books they may have written, to software or genomic sequence data that they might have created and placed in the public domain. Our new Regulation 40 ensures that this material is returned to its creators and that the shadow is thus lifted.

There has been some overly enthusiastic use of the University's chain of command for campaigning by the Council's supporters. See for example this email circulated to heads of department in the physical sciences and, through them, to many voters, asking them to sign one of the Council flysheets. Our voting mechanisms are designed to give rough equality of arms to the Council and its opponents, whoever they might be on the issue of the day: any flysheet signed by ten or more voters is circulated with the ballot papers. Asking line management to gather support for a ballot may not be forbidden explicitly by Ordnance, but has led to protests. If your feel it was inappropriate for Authority to canvas support in this way, we suggest you vote for the amendments instead when your ballot paper arrives.

Show your support by linking to this page: http://www.freecambridge.org

Background

Mike Clark has a history of intellectual property at Cambridge; here is a summary. For many years the University adopted a laissez-faire approach to IP; staff and students who invented useful things just filed patents, or started companies, or put software they wrote into the public domain. This was formalised in our 1987 policy which is widely acknowledged to have been one of the sources of the Cambridge Phenomenon.

However, a reform in 1999 created a Research Services Division that set out to build an empire out of commercialisation. In March 2001, the Council passed the now notorious Grace 6 under which all IP created by externally-funded researchers is claimed by the University, with the exception of `normal academic forms of publication'. No-one seems to have noticed this or objected to it at the time; it went through as routine business. In July 2002, the Council tried to extend these provisions to tenured academics, and there was a revolt.

The effect of taking `all IP' from academics is dramatic, and has been resisted also in other Universities where the authorities have tried it, such as UCL and Melbourne. For example, if the University owns the copyright in a popular book that I write, they not only get royalties but also the ability to forbid its publication. The same may apply to a talk I give that embarrasses some powerful interest. For this reason, academic ownership of copyright has always been seen as essential for basic freedom.

A second cluster of issues relate to the public domain. Many academics publish useful material - from software to genome sequence data - for others to use as they see fit. One effect of Cambridge's claiming IP in externally funded research since 2001 is that affected research staff and students who placed such material in the public domain in good faith, did not in fact have the legal ability to do so. Cambridge's IP claims thus pollute the public status of a number of important projects, which potentially include major genomic databases and popular free software products. A malicious company that wished to undermine free software might buy up Cambridge's residual rights, perhaps without RSD even realising their intentions. The SCO lawsuit shows what might happen. EU proposals to criminalise all IP infringement with commercial effects will mean that, in future, a malicious company would not even have to buy the residual copyrights from RSD; the fact that some code infringed Cambridge's copyright could be enough to launch a prosecution.

A third bundle of issues concerns the practical scope of claiming `all IP except normal academic forms of publication'. It covers everything from musicians' compositions through archaeologists' catalogues and scientists' lab notebooks to everyone's email archive. If the claims were ever asserted, job mobility would be seriously impaired. The university has said that it would not assert such claims; in that case the policy should have been drafted to exclude them.

In any case, there was an outcry against the 2002 IP report. There was a stormy Discussion in the Regent House on the 15-22 October 2002. Council then set up a committee to think about the problem, and its report in August 2003 led to a Second Report on IP on 26 March 2004 followed in turn by a Discussion at which most speakers were still hostile. A little-changed Third Report in May 2004 led to a further Discussion, at which the Pro-Vice-Chancellor proposing the policy, Ian Leslie, admitted that the University would probably not make a lot of money from it. Finally the Vice-Chancellor used her majority on Council to force the matter to a vote in the Regent House.

For further, more detailed background, here is our initial reaction from 2002; and a more detailed analysis with links to the press coverage at the time and to academic research on the effectiveness of technology transfer that underlines the effectiveness of our 1987 policy.

Finally, there is a mailing list you can join, and there is also some discussion of the issue on the ucam.change.governance newsgroup.

IP Ballot - Vote for the Amendments!

For more on the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms, and more links, see our old web page.