Letters and Comment

• Author: Ram Chandra Subedi/Bryan Harris
• Position: Advocate, Supreme Court of Nepal/Professor Emeritus of Materials Science, University of Bath, UK.

IP in universities - far from rosy

I am curious to know how much of the article and follow-up letters about IP in universities (Putting Policies in Place - Issue no. 5/2006; Letters and Comment - issue no. 6/2006) were written by administrators or lawyers, whose jobs are actually parasitic on the backs of active academics, with whose intellectual products the article was concerned.

From a UK perspective, the article paints far too rosy a view of the interaction between universities and industry, and fails signally to mention the important problems that have arisen in the past. Notwithstanding the idealistic notion that Academe and Industry can - and perhaps should - work together for mutual benefit, the reality is that there is a fundamental disparity of objectives, which in many cases, even if not always, prevents the cosy symbiosis presented in the article. Industry is about making profits for shareholders. A university should be a place where minds are trained, preferably in a disinterested environment.

Big industry is used to paying as little as it can get away with for the research it wants. It demands secrecy, non-disclosure agreements, and holding back on patenting in order to get ‘lead-time.' It is able to cut short any research programme which is not moving fast enough. These factors, together with the over-riding short-termism of much industrial research, are directly at odds with good practice in the education of researchers. SMEs are even worse, because in many instances they cannot actually afford the necessary cash for their contributions, which therefore often end up being ‘in-kind.' Twice, in my own experience, the managing directors of SMEs with which I had collaborative research programmes walked away from the programmes with the entire IP and sold it elsewhere to their own profit.

Moreover, the basic rights of academics to their own ideas are being eroded. While most university websites now describe how income from the IP of their academics is shared ‘fairly' between the originators and the university, it is never clear how much say the academics themselves have had. Cambridge academics fought hard, but unsuccessfully, to prevent the University changing employment contracts so that all faculty IPR belong to it alone. One wonders how Isaac Newton would have fared in Cambridge today?

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