Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms

Analysis of the Vice-Chancellor's Proposal

Freedoms at Cambridge University are under threat. A policy change proposed by the University's Vice-Chancellor will severely undermine academic freedom, adversely change the employment conditions of existing faculty by expropriating our copyrights and patents, make the recruitment of new faculty significantly harder, and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs - the large number of high-tech businesses spun off from the University, known as the Cambridge Phenomenon.

The proposal was discussed in the Regent House on the 15th and 22nd October.

This page presents an analysis of the proposed changes. It was written not just for people preparing to speak at the Regent House, but for people anlysing the effect that the proposals will have on your academic life (or your business). I explain what they will do, give pointers to the relevant economic literature, and estimate the main positive and negative effects of the changes for individual faculty members, research students, departments, the University, the regional economy, and academic freedom.

The analysis is broken down under the following headings:

• Copyright - including the effects on books, lecture notes and free software
• Patent rights - from externally funded research to `the idea you have in the bath'
• Other rights and restrictions - including MTAs, trade secrets and databases
• Consulting arrangements by faculty members and research students
• Organisation - including conflicts of interest and internal competition
• Broader rights - effects on academic freedom and the governance of the University

See also the main web page of the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms; other sources include Mike Clark's page on the history of intellectual property at Cambridge, the original page I wrote on this subject, and press coverage in the Observer, the Telegraph, the Cambridge Evening News, ZDNET, THES, the Wall Street Journal and Frankfurter Rundschau. There's also the BBC, which our Vice Chancellor told that "The university has a right to a share because I think there are very few true individuals. Most people have to rely on others". (If he is asserting that the median Cambridge faculty member has never published a significant single-author paper, I'd like to see his statistics.)

There's also a rather appropriate Dilbert, which you can buy on a T-shirt.

(: I may update this page once the Cornish committee reports. Meanwhile, some new research has been published in a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Industrial Organization on the Economics of Intellectual Property at Universities and some more in the January 2003 issue of the Journal of Technology Transfer - note that this issue is free online. There are also nice short and long literature surveys from Ajay Agrawal.)

Copyright

It is most unusual for universities to claim copyright in the material created by their faculty or students, with the exception of some very restricted types of material like exam papers. In the UK, there was an attempt in 2000 by UCL to do this, which was defeated by widespread resistance from faculty members. Some US universities have tried to claim rights to lecture notes, but this has also been strongly resisted and I am aware of no respectable universities that do it. (See for example the practices at California and Cornell, and the policy statement of the American Association of University Professors.) Cambridge would become a laughing stock if we let our bureaucrats grab rights that are the fiercely defended preserve of their creators everywhere else.

The justification given privately by senior members of Cambridge University for this attempted grab is that an engineering lecturer used tens of thousands of pounds' worth of resources from our Audio Visual Aids Unit to create a fancy course, which he then sold privately as well as giving to local students. It seems that the only way the Vice Chancellor can see to prevent such abuses is to own our copyright. (Powerpoint made the AVA obsolete, and it was disbanded a year or two ago, so the point is now irrelevant anyway.)

The consequences of giving the University default ownership of copyright will be grave.

• Software sharing is a critical research tool in many disciplines. Computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians and others often share results by making software freely available on the Net. The most spectacular Cambridge achievement is perhaps the Sanger center's Ensembl project but there is much more. (Here is some of ours.) Other leading universities also contribute; MIT, for example, is home to the Free Software Foundation. However, some powerful companies - notably Microsoft - dislike free software and campaign vigorously against it. They argue that it's unfair for their tax money to fund academics who publish free software that competes with their own commercial product. (The argument is bogus, as tax money funds all sorts of ventures, but Microsoft is still on the warpath on the issue.) Now, Bill Gates is the University's largest private donor, and our bureaucrats bend over backwards to be nice to him. So once the decision on whether or not to publish free software is no longer made by individual faculty members, but by the head of Research Services Division, we may expect trouble. Indeed, in his attempt to rebut the arguments presented here, the Vice-Chancellor claims that when giving away software the `university's technology transfer office is still critical in overseeing the contract.' This makes computer scientists seriously unrelaxed (and has a similar effect on many physicists, geneticists, astronomers and others whose work practices include extensive software sharing).
• Notebooks and other research records are squarely within the university's IP grab. Like most academics, I have dozens of boxes of paper notes and tens of thousands of electronic files, containing everything from minutes of seminars, through successive versions of software I've worked on with colleagues, to archives of emails. If the new policy is enforced against everyone, ownership of everything I accumulate after that will pass to Research Services Division. This would make it harder for academics to seek employment elsewhere, and push down the quality of new hires. (It will also create a number of traps - see the Pelletier case discussed below.) Perhaps on the other hand the rule will only be enforced when the papers are worth a lot of money. So famous dons' families will no longer be able to sell their papers to the National Heritage Fund for millions after they die; the University will sell them instead and trouser the proceeds. Is that really the kind of signal the University should send - `Wanted, Professor of Physics, no Nobel Prizewinners need apply?'
• As lectures are commissioned by the University, lecture notes will become the university's copyright and so will books based on them. Many faculty members have written books based on lecture notes, and this is a traditional way for university teachers to supplement our pitiful salaries. My own book, Security Engineering, is based on notes developed for my second and third year undergraduate courses on cryptography and information security; the royalties make up a third of my salary again. If I lose the right to maintain and refresh this income stream by rewriting the book every few years to keep up with progress, or even if I just have to share the royalties with the University, this will be a severe adverse change in my conditions of employment.
• The policy also asserts ownership in the copyright of lectures commissioned from faculty members by third parties. To take another personal example, I have occasionally supplemented my income by giving courses in industry (we're officially encouraged to do this). A course might involve spending a day at an accountancy firm or an electronics manufacturer giving a series of talks, some of which are drawn from my undergraduate courses while others are written specially for the occasion. The latter will now become University property too. This will give the University, for the first time, a mandatory role in faculty members' private consulting arrangements - a matter to which I'll return below.
• Non-academic works that academics publish in their field of professional competence are caught. If you write a book without enough equations and footnotes in it, you will no longer own it. This policy would entitle the University to royalties from bestsellers such as Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. (The policy isn't retrospective, but will catch both future bestsellers and future editions of existing non-academic works). The likely effect is that some celebrity dons will move to other universities, while others will stop publishing - or cut private exemption deals with the Vice Chancellor that the rest of us won't hear about. Meanwhile, spare a thought for the poor scholars of Divinity - their sermons, being devotional rather than academic, will henceforth be under the control of Dr Secher.
• Music is not a `normal form of academic publication', so any tunes you compose will be caught - so long as music is related to your field of study. You don't have to be a Professor of Music, either. What if you are an ecclesiastical historian - if you publish an arrangement of Gregorian chant, will it belong to RSD? If you are a chaplain and sing along with the choir, do you need to beg RSD for a release before you can cut a CD for your favourite charity? (This is not a trivial issue - in Australia, which seems to have the most repressive rules in the world, universities claim all faculty copyright but give broader exemptions than that on offer to us - such as `works of creativity that result from scholarly work'. Universities that tried to be tougher, such as Melbourne, got so bogged down in copyright assignment paperwork that they relented.)

As for the economic effects, we know quite a lot about software. A few years ago, the University of California tightened the rules on faculty making software available for free; the Regents have been persuaded to relax them again, as the net effect was a reduction in research funding from industry. The reasons for this are complex, but are starting to be understood. Many industrial sponsors want work they've paid for to become a standard, while a lot of the brightest programmers are reluctant to work on closed systems, at least for the sort of wages Universities pay to research staff. There is a strong signalling effect: working on systems whose code will be published enables a programmer to use this code as a reference when seeking fully paid jobs later. There is also an element of idealism, and the satisfaction of contributing to a product like GNU/linux or Apache that is very widely used. The economics of open source software is now a specialist subject in its own right; for more, see the relevant conferences.

There is little economic literature speaking directly to the likely effects of the university's copyright grab as a whole, as it is so broad as to be unprecedented. The normal copyright rule, that one finds at places like the University of California, is that unpatentable scholarly works are the property of the originator. But there are two sets of general results that have some relevance.

• Some researchers, such as Beath, model a university as an employer that seeks to maximise research output by allowing faculty to spend some time working for themselves - so it can get away with paying them lower salaries and thus hire more and/or better researchers given its budget constraints. If this is your view of the world, then as Cambridge already has problems attracting world-class faculty to fill endowed chairs, imposing a tax on part-time earnings will lead to a decrease the quality of faculty. Even if you don't buy this model, first principles suggest strongly that something will have to give if Cambridge moves from being the university with the lowest salaries in the UK, but the most liberal rules on IP and consultancy, to one with the lowest salaries, with the least liberal IP rules and with consultancy earnings under threat (which I discuss below).
• A number of studies, cited in the next section, support the idea that there is a strong correlation between faculty incentives and a university's success at technology transfer - which is one of the reasons cited for the proposed policy. Although these papers focus on the issue of patent rights, the expropriation of copyrights will also undermine faculty incentives and thus impede the transfer of technology to local industry.

Patent rights

The debate has been confused by the fact that there are three separate types of patent arrangement at present in the university (as indeed at MIT, Stanford, UMIST and many other institutions).

• Government-sponsored research: if a patent arises in the course of government-funded research, then the patent belongs to the university, and the royalties are split with the inventor, her department and the university getting a third each.
• Research sponsored by industry or a charity: here patent rights are a matter of private negotiation between the inventor and the sponsor. Intel, for example, lets inventors keep the patent rights while AT&T does not. From the 1st October, the university's rules will change so that the university will own the rights where the sponsor does not claim them. (Smart investigators will evade this by writing a suitable contract with their sponsors, so it will in effect be a tax on the naive.)
• Independent research: if a faculty member has an idea other than as part of an externally-funded project, she owns it. So an idea you have in the bath is your property.

What will be the likely economic effects?

There is a substantial economic literature in the USA studying the effect of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 which gave universities the right to patent and licence the results of government-funded research. The most important papers appear to be the following.

• Mowery and Sampat provide interesting background reading - a study of university patent policy from 1925 to 1980. During this period, the arguments for and against patenting were repeatedly discussed and patenting gradually took off. Top institutions acquired patent policies in the 1930s, and aggressive patenting gathered pace among private universities in the mid 1970s.
• The earliest major study after the 1980 rule change, by Henderson, Jaffe and Trajtenberg in 1994, reported that although there was a large increase in the number of patents, the quality had fallen; it appeared that the universities had not improved their underlying research (as the advocates of privatisation had hoped) but had merely lowered the threshold and filed a large quantity of junk. This casts serious doubt on the RSD line that there are huge quantities of untapped IPR lying around in the university that just need to be rounded up and sold off.
• In 1998, Jensen and Thursby analysed the conflicting interests of inventors, universities and licensees. universities, and risk-averse inventors, prefer not to follow through their inventions and would rather sell a patent for a lump sum, while the majority of inventions were in such an embryonic state that they needed a lot more inventor input to turn into a product. A combination of royalty plus lump sum is better; equity is better still; and sponsored research can also be pretty effective. The tech transfer business is less competitive than one might think; only 22% of licences had more than one bidder.
• In 1999, Jaffe and Lerner studied the effects of privatising R&D at US national laboratories such as Lawrence Livermore. They found that technology transfer flourished where there was less bureaucratic interference, such as where the company with the technology transfer contract changed. This casts serious doubt on the wisdom of replacing Cambridge's diffuse and ad-hoc arrangements with a rigid central bureaucracy.
• Thursby and Thursby confirmed the earlier results of Henderson, Jaffe and Trajtenberg by showing that incentives did not corrupt research - academics simply licensed more, and university technology transfer offices became less inefficient over time. They also confirmed the Jensen and Thursby result that most inventions are primitive at the patent stage and need follow-through if technology transfer is to succeed.
• The dissenting voice in the tech transfer debate in the USA is that of Richard Nelson and his colleagues, who argue in various papers that University patenting, on balance, hinders rather than helps technology transfer; and that things went better in the old days when researchers simply put their discoveries in the public domain. The less university control, the better; and the lower the tax that universities imposed on industry, the better.
• Mowery and Ziedonis looked at the geographical effects of licensing and found that commercial transactions tended to more localised than the technology spillover that would otherwise have happened.
• Friedman and Silberman followed this up by looking at the factors that made for success in technology transfer. They found that rewards for faculty involved in technology transfer mattered, as did the university's location in or near a cluster of technology firms, a clear mission in support of technology transfer and an experienced technology transfer office. So if the goal of RSD's policy is technology transfer, then cutting incentives will not advance it.
• Link and Siegel confirm this and show that universities which allocate a higher proportion of royalty payments to faculty members tend to be more proficient in their technology transfer activities. (This paper's available by email from Don Siegel - SiegeD@rpi.edu).

There is less literature specific to Cambridge, but this is compensated by quality: the book by Segal Quince & Wicksteed that coined the phrase `Cambridge Phenomenon' for the large number of high-tech companies clustered around the university. It argues that an ethos of self-confidence of the University of Cambridge inspired start-up companies around it, and that the ability to retain intellectual property rights allowed university people to try exploiting their ideas with new firms.

As an example of how IP at Cambridge works, I got the idea of using balanced self-checking logic for smartcard CPUs in a tearoom conversation with my colleague Simon Moore in early 1999. We filed a patent application using our own money and proceeded to raise seven-figure financing for a collaborative research project that, from the scientific point of view, was outstandingly successful. Our paper on this technology won the best presentation award at Async 2002, and en route we discovered a new semiconductor testing technology that made the front page of the New York Times. From the business point of view, the timing was unlucky; if we'd started two years earlier we'd be rich. But that's life: most technologies fail, so technologists have to take risks, and individual faculty are more likely to take them than institutions - so long as the incentives are there. Without at least the prospect of creating something valuable, it's unlikely that we'd have put in all the effort that we did, and made the contribution to the basic science that we ended up making.

Our experience, and that of colleagues, is that our `day' job of research and our `weekend' activities of technology transfer, consultancy and so on, are not substitutes, but complements. Ideas from research feed into business, and vice versa. There can be no telling, at the start of a project, whether it will come up with an idea that will win a Nobel Prize, or found a large company. In the case of our smartcard idea, an attempt to make money led to scientific progress instead; it often goes the other way too. Science is an unpredictable business, and erecting barriers in the way of exploitation will inevitably hinder research too.

In addition to the IP polices at MIT and Stanford, and our current policy, you might care to have a look at the policies of other leading US universities, such as CMU and Columbia. CMU gives faculty all their copyright and 85% of patent income, unless the research was funded by the university in which case they get 50%; Columbia gives faculty all their copyright and 25% of patent, plus a further 25% to be spent on their research, and allows faculty to veto any license on conscientious grounds. The worst is Johns Hopkins where the inventor's share is as low as 10%. (Johns Hopkins is notoriously the worst major US university when it comes to technology transfer.) Some other US policies are linked here, while the policies of Canadian universities are here.

The view of business must surely matter too. After all, they are the customers to whom RSD hopes to sell the IP that will magically appear once we're compelled to hand it over. The view of local high-tech business people is uniformly hostile to the proposals, and they have recently written a letter to the Vice Chancellor expressing this (the text of which I'm unfortunately not allowed to post here).

Other intellectual property rights and restrictions

• One of the most serious threats to academic freedom is that the university will assert ownership, without any exemptions, of our database rights. In the EU, database rights protect a 'collection of works, data or other independent material, arranged in a systematic way and individually accessible.' This does not merely affect computer types who have assembled a web page of links on their speciality! If you have spent twenty years compiling a concordance to the Indus script, or a guide to the butterflies of Irian Jaya, or the definitive bibliography on fifteenth-century Portuguese literature, you are at risk: from the 1st of January the ownership of such resources will pass to the university (presumably, as as soon as you do any maintenance on the data). All of a sudden, it's going to become a lot harder to move to an academic (or other) job elsewhere.
• There will be particularly serious consequences for university employees working on the large number of genome projects in the Cambridge area, most of which seek to place the databases in the public domain. This may result in millions of pounds' worth of grant funding being transferred away from Cambridge University to places like the Sanger Centre - which will cost the University a seven-figure sum directly in lost overhead charges on the grants.
• Moral rights are also an issue. They may count for little in UK IP law, but that does not make them unimportant to UK academics. For example, when my book was published, the publishers wanted to go to press while the numbering of the bibliography entries was out of phase with the text. I needed to invoke my moral rights under US law to compel them to do the job properly. In future, it's not clear I'd be able to do that. RSD has published a FAQ on the proposed changes which denies any intention to assume moral rights. What matters, of course, is not an FAQ but the text of whatever University policy is duly enacted. (Incidentally, neither the FAQ nor the Vice-Chancellor's statement offers a convincing denial of the other issues raised here).
• A related issue is whether faculty members have the right to prohibit a use of their creation to which they have a moral objection. There have been a number of cases involving issues such as the licensing of AIDS drugs to companies that refuse to make them available at low cost to sufferers in Africa. As a result of such cases, some US universities (such as Columbia) have an inventor veto on all licenses. It can be more complex still, as in the TCPA case: in the mid-1990s, William Arbaugh of the University of Pennsylvania invented a security mechanism that now underlies the TCPA initiative managed by Intel. Dr Arbaugh has now decided that he disapproves of TCPA. U Penn did ask Intel for royalties; Intel refused, calculating (correctly) that U Penn would not want to spend years and millions of dollars fighting them in court. The rational thing would be for U Penn to give Dr Arbaugh back his patent, so he can donate it to an organisation such as EFF that would give Intel a run for its money. U Penn apparently won't do this.
• There are a number of special rights that particular faculty may get caught by - plant breeder rights, topographies of semiconductors, industrial design laws. Some of these are not founded in UK law, and so RSD are unlikely to have expertise in them: an example is the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act in the USA. It is hard to be sure that an obscure law won't suddenly affect you. For example, I have recently been giving occasional assistance to a French film maker who is producing an art film on copyright piracy. I'm helping him for free as it's a fun project, and a new experience. Now the IP surrounding films is complex and obscure. If the project extends past December, will I be breaking my contract of employment with the University?
• Cambridge University also proposes to assert ownership of all our trade secrets. This might seem ridiculous - what business has the university in wanting to own the heuristics that I use when looking for flaws in authentication protocols, and which I've never got round to writing down? Will I be forbidden from ever writing them down? The practical purpose of this appears to be bureaucratic empire building - RSD now wants to approve all nondisclosure agreements, materials transfer agreements and so on that faculty members sign (previously faculty members had signed NDAs as individuals, a procedure that is much cheaper and reduces the University's potential liability). There will be significant other adverse effects. One disturbing precedent is Pelletier v Agouron. Huguette Pelletier, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSD, had her research stolen by a colleague and patented by Agouron, the employer of her colleague's husband. She sued for theft of trade secrets, but a court initially ruled that she could not sue as she didn't own the secrets. This was because a clause in her employment contracts at the University of California that gave the university ownership of the lab notebooks for work funded by third parties (such as the NIH, which paid her salary). Although she eventually prevailed on appeal, the university's ownership caused her considerable grief and expense - despite supposedly being `to protect academic freedom'.

There is also the simple point that academia is in many ways a gift economy; people acquire status in proportion to the benefits that we give to our peers. At the formal level, such gifts take the form of new facts and theories on which others can build. At the informal level, they are backed up by numerous other kinds of gift - helping organise a conference, running a website with a specialist subject bibliography, maintaining a critical software tool, or providing informal free consulting to colleagues in other disciplines. All these activities are under threat, directly or indirectly, from the proposed policy. How can you participate in a gift economy when the things that you can give are under the control of others?

Consulting arrangements by faculty members

At York, you have to hand over 40% of your consulting income to the university; at Glasgow, it's 50%. I wonder what rate will be set here?

If RSD is determined to lock down our patents and copyrights, then it's logical for them to lock down consultancy too.

• First, consultancy provides too big a loophole. There is nothing at present to stop me getting a consulting agreement with a company owned by my wife that pays me a pound a year and in return gets first refusal on my IPR.
• Second, otherwise they are imposing a tax on faculty members' self-employed income that's not fiscally neutral: it is inefficient for them to interfere in our decisions whether to spend our evenings and weekends inventing gadgets, writing textbooks or consulting for Microsoft. (On that philosophy the top internal tax rate on consultancy should be 67%, as it is on patent royalties.)
• Third, taxing patents but not consultancy is discriminatory, as it hurts computer scientists, but leaves economists and lawyers alone.

For this reason, I argued in the Times Higher Educational Supplement that we need internal competition in the university for technology transfer. Where a patent must by law be held by the university, the inventor should have a choice of teams to which she can turn for offers. Colleges provide one natural focus for teams: some of them, like Trinity and Johns, have world-famous science parks. Some departments are active too. The technology transfer scene at Cambridge is already too large and diverse, with competing companies and clashing egos, to be squeezed into a single bureaucratic mold. We also need to think about whether we need to have a separate place to which inventors can turn for independent advice.

It's also important to understand that technology transfer is not a panacea, which will overnight fix the university's deficit. On the contrary; it's very easy to lose money. Of the University of California campuses, three lost money at this business in 2001 (Santa Barbara lost $415,000, Santa Cruz lost $212,000 while San Diego lost a whopping $1,904,000).

Recall that of the studies cited above, Henderson, Jaffe and Trajtenberg reported that the rush to patent did not unlock any treasure trove of new valuable IP, but just added a lot of junk patents to the few good ones that came along anyway; Jaffe and Lerner emphasised the harm done by bureaucratisation of the process; while Thursby and Thursby showed that TTOs have a steep learning curve to climb. RSD, being new to the game, might take a decade to learn it; the returns to investment in this business take typically ten years to arrive (most of the university's patent royalties today are from the Campath patent, filed in 1987); and in the intervening twenty years, RSD's TTO staff will consume perhaps one or two million pounds a year.

RSD say that they need control of IP in order to `do deals', and their supporters have quoted a deal at Oxford whereby the chemistry department sold their next 15 years' inventions to a venture capital group in return for some money towards a new building. There is a small problem here. The Oxford deal was done with the consent of faculty members; but when RSD has tried to do such deals, the affected faculty have not even been told! One disgraceful example was when Microsoft was planning to open a research lab in Cambridge a few years ago, and RSD suggested to them that they could get first refusal on all IP generated by computing faculty. We, the faculty, were never told; and had we been told, we'd probably have run Microsoft out of town on a rail. As it was, the deal was held up for eighteen months while wiser heads worked to persuade the top people at Microsoft that RSD's promise had been empty. When a delicately negotiated compromise was presented to us at a staff meeting, the then head of department was roasted, and Microsoft had to do without any agreement at all. After that, how can faculty members trust RSD? Would you buy even a used car from someone who's previously tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge?

There is a widespread suspicion that RSD wants to do an even larger deal than that. The precedent that's being quoted is that of Imperial which has sold an option on all its future IP for an eight-figure sum. However much the Vice-Chancellor might like a cheque for thirty or even fifty million pounds, to cover for a few years the trading deficit into which his administration has led us, it seems most imprudent to conduct such an asset sale under distress conditions at the nadir of the technology market. Prospective purchasers will surely become aware that the sale is contrary to the wishes - and the rights - of the people who're supposed to generate the IP they're paying for. The most likely outcome is a paltry sum of money followed by a lot of litigation.

There is also the more basic point that RSD is incompetent. We all suffer from their mistakes and delays with the basic paperwork of research grant administration; last year, their inability to prepare a contract in time cost us an eight-figure research investment from Marconi. Their new wheeze, of building a vast new empire based on our IP, will merely distract them from the urgent task of getting the basics right.

Basic Rights

• A popular book espousing politically or economically controversial ideas could be suppressed, discouraged, or even pushed out of circulation. For example an economist attacking the justice and efficacy of foreign aid programmes dear to the current government; a climate physicist writing newspaper articles supportive of Lomborg's critique of the environmentalist lobby; a feminist professor writing a popular condemnation of industry hiring practices that had the potential to irritate powerful donors; an anthropologist whose controversial mass market book attacks or defends immigration; or a theologian whose critiques of contemporary Islam are deemed to increase the risk of terrorism aimed at the university -- all of these might find the university using the copyright either to suppress publication or to channel it into places where it will rest safely unread.
• The proposals also undermine public speech. I recently gave a talk at a Privacy International conference on September 11th, at which some of the points I made from the viewpoint of security economics were controversial. Political conference speeches are not a `normal form of academic publication' so presumably, from January 2003, Cambridge University will own the copyright in such speeches and would be able to tell Privacy International not to put the text, or a recording, on its web site. (When I mentioned this to a distinguished freedom of information lawyer at the conference, he pointed out that the University would then be liable for any defamation that I uttered, so it will have a real incentive to control such speech.)
• At the very least, there is the appearance of a conflict of interest which might chill academics, cause them to self-censor and undermine popular confidence in the objectivity of their work for the lay public. Even if the university did not in fact practice censorship on a daily basis, it would be in a position to, which would taint for the public the work of those Cambridge academics who undertake the important task of popularizing academic research. It would be impossible to know what bias had been introduced.
• As remarked above, software sharing is an integral part of the modus operandi of many scientists. Centralising decisions about whether software can be put in the public domain would be an intolerable burden, and would open the University to pressure from corporate interests. Microsoft's strong opposition to free software is a particular worry. Even if their current university liaison people are smart enough to realise that clamping down on Cambridge would cost them more than they could gain, it seems imprudent to give such hostages to fortune. Are those of us who use computers to have less academic freedom than our colleagues writing footnoted books in the humanities?
• The Felten case is an example of what can go wrong when academia gets mixed up with attempts to enforce copyright protection. Ed Felten of Princeton showed that a copyright protection scheme proposed by the music industry was not much good, and was threatened with legal action. There was a long, complex, messy and celebrated lawsuit that ended indecisively. The threats of legal action against the universities that employed the paper authors, and CMU which hosted the workshop at which the paper was due to be presented, were a serious test of these institutions' commitment to academic freedom. Having been involved in the matter (as a member of the workshop program committee under threat of personal liability, and as one of the inventors of work that Felten built on) I am concerned that exposing Cambridge University to the threat of huge damages by giving it control over our copyrights is exceptionally unwise from the point of view of liberty.
• Introducing regulations that discriminate against some university staff (by drastically changing the terms of employment of staff hired or promoted since 1998) will lead to litigation, and whatever the outcome the atmosphere will be chilled.
• University administrators already appear to be resorting to censorship in order to get their way.
• I've left one of the most sinister aspects till the last. A recent book describes how, in one legal jurisdiction after another, the courts have started turning the human personality into an intellectual property right. By combining threads from the theories of unfair competition and dignitary torts, they seek to protect the value of celebrities to their advertising sponsors. This new `intellectual property right' looks set for rapid development. This gives the University's claim to `all our IPR' a distinctly worrying twist. Presumably RSD will be able to help themselves to 67% of what Stephen Hawking earns from doing adverts for BT - but that might be only the start of it.

Action

There was a Discussion in the Regent House on the 15th and 22nd October, that was even reported by the BBC. One of the highlights was a speech by Tom Körner; we also received overwhelming support from Cambridge University Students' Union.

According to our spies, the Council referred the matter back to the research Policy Committee, but as the secretary of this committee is the Director of Research Services (the main advocate for the policy within the bureaucracy) we can expect their next recommendation to be similarly unacceptable. Most likely, they will try to get their way piecemeal - take the patents this year, the database rights next year, the copyrights the year after that, and then finally impose a tax on all our consultancy on the grounds of being fair to those who've already lost most of their royalty income. In this case, we'll have to hang together, or they'll hang us separately.

At the Council elections in November, both of the members elected in class b were pro-freedom (Martin Rees and me) while two of the four candidates elected in class c had also come out in favour of freedom (Richard Barnes and James Matheson) and the other two had declined to take a position. The openly pro-RSD candidates - John Bell and Jeremy Sanders - were both defeated. The mood of the University seems clearer on this issue than on just about any other.

Ross Anderson

The report of the Cornish Committee was published on the 6th August 2003. This committee was set up by the Vice-chancellor to advise him how to proceed, and its report suggested much as I predicted two paragraphs above: take patent rights now, as it wouldn't be politically possible to do any more for the time being. Nonetheless, it is still a fairly damning indictment of how the University has managed IP over the last couple of years.

Acknowledgements: a number of people have contributed to this analysis and exposition including Michael Ashburner, James Boyle, Mike Clark, Simon Deakin, Richard Evans, Chris Lowe, David MacKay, David Newbery. Pam Samuelson and a number of colleagues who are still in what VCs call `stealth mode'.