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Relevant articles from the Times Higher Education Supplement *********************************************************************** 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.) *********************************************************************** 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." *********************************************************************** 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. ***********************************************************************