Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms

Background - the IP Dispute at Cambridge

Until 2001, the copyrights and other intellectual property rights in academic work at the University belonged (with a few narrow exceptions) to the people who did the work. In 2001, a policy change was made for staff funded by research contracts: all their intellectual property rights (with a few narrow exceptions) now belong to the University. This passed unremarked and, initially, unenforced. In 2002, the Vice-Chancellor proposed to extend this expropriation to tenured academic staff as well.

This time, people took note. We set up the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms and produced an analysis of the likely effects. At a Discussion in the Regent House in October 2002, the great majority of speakers expressed outrage. A speech by Tom Körner became a classic. We got wide press coverage including the Observer, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC, to whom our Vice Chancellor said "The university has a right to a share because I think there are very few true individuals. Most people have to rely on others". This collectivist view did not go down very well!

The University's governing body, the Council, reacted to this outrage in the usual way - by setting up a committee to report back once the fuss had died down. This committee, chaired by IP lawyer Bill Cornish, published its report almost a year later, in August 2003. It suggested that the University should take only patent rights, as it wouldn't be politically possible to do any more for the time being. There was a Discussion of the Report on the 21st October. The mood of the Regent House was against even Cornish's compromise, and in favour of restoring our rights as they were before 2001. Yet the detailed regulations now published by Cornish in 2004 are closer to the 2002 policy than to his 2003 compromise. They will give University bureaucrats a veto over many aspects of academic life that were previously under the sole control of academics.

The Proposed Regulations

Although the proposals leave us with default ownership of copyright, they make a large number of other claims which undermine this apparent liberty:

• First, they will assert central ownership of all intellectual property rights that are acquired by registration, such as patents, plant-breeders' rights, registered designs and trademarks.
• Second, the University will take a range of rights related to copyright, such as database rights in compilations. They will also take a number of ancilliary copyrights where University equipment is involved, such as in typographical designs and sound recordings.
• Third, the University will take many further rights by contractual agreement. Any external funding of research will cause resulting copyrights or confidential information to belong to either the sponsor or the University, but not to the creator. This will be the case not just for the contract research staff but also for tenured academics involved in the project.

Effects on Academic Freedom of Enquiry

• Perhaps the most direct effect will be on biological scientists who sequence DNA and put the results in the public domain. The University claim on the database rights in their work will mean that they will need permission to do this. In fact, people who have contributed to public-domain databases since 2001 - and who have been funded with research contracts - have already polluted those databases with potential claims of University ownership. Even if they sincerely believed that they could place this material in the public domain, the database rights actually belonged to the University. So someone could buy these rights from a future University administration and use them to sue the public-domain databases and their users - just as SCO is suing Linux and its users. The reputational damage to the University, and the harm to the public good, would be colossal. In fact, a Royal Society inquiry chaired by a former pro-vice-chancellor of the university recommended the abolition of database rights altogether. (After I raised the DNA issue in Council, the last sentence of clause 7 was inserted, which says that the University won't sell these rights on without consulting their creators. That's nowhere near good enough - these rights must be relinquished for good.)
• Another example is clause 7's claim of rights in typographic arrangements of published works, where these are made with University equipment. This appears to presume that published works, such as this web page, are published by the University rather than by the individual responsible for them (the typographical arrangement copyright goes by default to the publisher - see the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act section 9). This would give the University the right to demand that I take down the page, even if it were hosted on a non-University server. Even if such censorship were not practised on a daily basis, its mere possibility should be opposed. In fact, a University report earlier described academic ownership of copyright as ``an important guarantee of academic freedom' and strongly recommended that ``No change should be made to this basic rule.''
• Another likely direct effect is on academic visitors. Clause 10 of the policy provides for all visitors to be bound by the regulations. When once in the past a US university asked me to sign an NDA and IP transfer agreement on visiting, I simply refused. So would most smart people. If this obnoxious practice becomes the norm in Cambridge, visitors just won't come here. We will be isolated.

There are more global reasons why individual academic ownership of intellectual property is important. See Larry Lessig's latest book, or my detailed analysis of the 2002 IP proposal. Over the last twenty years, a coalition of drug companies, the music industry and software publishers have pushed for ever more extensive copyright laws, which are being used to control culture and enclose the digital commons. Academics have been prominent in the fightback, through such diverse initiatives as the Public Library of Science, other open publishing initiatives, the Free Software movement and the Creative Commons. MIT, our US partner in CMI, has MIT Open Courseware.

The strategic effects will be even worse. The policy is the latest in a sequence of reforms started by the last Vice-Chancellor to turn Cambridge from a decentralised organisation controlled by the academic staff, much like the partners in a law firm, into a corporate entity in which power is wielded centrally by the Vice-Chancellor acting through the Unified Administrative Service. This reform has fostered bureaucratic empire-building and pushed the University from profit into loss. It has undermined our autonomy and our working conditions. If we cannot use our democratic mechanisms to draw a line in the sand on even this issue, then the depredations will continue. We've had an email policy that threatened academic staff with the sack if we ever sent an email that might offend anybody; we've had departmental administrators blocking the use of departmental email to people wishing to discuss IP issues with colleagues. Most shocking of all was the case of Mike Clark: our Research Services Division agreed, without his knowledge or consent, that he would submit all his relevant publications for vetting by a drug company that had licensed one of the University's patents. That's our future once RSD controls all our IP. And consultancy's next. Now that the demons of envy have been unleashed, Council members are starting to talk about requiring people who earn money from consulting to contribute a percentage to the Chest.

Oh, and by the way, Regulation 27 in the new proposal will prevent campaigns such as this one from using the University's crest in future. We use it in order to emphasise that we the academics, not the Unified Administrative Service, are the University. Sir Humphrey doesn't seem to appreciate that.

Effects on Academic Earnings and Employment Rights

If the new policy gets through, many academics wishing to earn side income involving creative intellectual activity will be beholden to the University for permissions, licenses or letters of comfort. Some of the richest academics - the medics, the lawyers and the writers of popular books - will probably escape, but people like scientists, technologists and language-teaching entrepreneurs will be caught. Just as in a typical national taxation system, the rich will get off scot-free, the poor will pay a bit, and the middle class will bear the brunt. Consider the following cases.

• Cambridge academics will no longer be permitted to register domain names, as these are registrable intellectual property rights. This will affect not just our ability to engage in business, but also our ability to brand our research projects (as with G3card, with which I raised a lot of money for the University), and even our charitable activities. For example, when I set up the Foundation for Information Policy Research, one of the first things I did - before even registering the company - was to register fipr.org.
• Suppose you teach a lecture course at Cambridge, and give it elsewhere during the vacation for extra money. At present, you own all the intellectual property in the course, so that's OK. You can even turn your course into a book and sell it. Under the new regulations, the University will claim the typographic-design copyright in your Powerpoint slides, if they were made with University equipment. So you must either buy your own computer, or accept the risk that the University can at some future time demand a share of your lecturing fees. Also, if you prepared illustrations for your book using a University computer, you might be obliged to hand over some of your royalties. Also, the University claims a free perpetual license to all your teaching materials, so it can set up in competition with you.
• A lecturer in Korean writes a language teaching book, based on Cambridge teaching, to compete with the expensive Linguaphone course. Although she owns the copyright in the course material, the University owns the database rights in the vocabulary. If she used a University-owned computer to set the text, the University owns the typographical-design copyright, and if the microphone used to record the spoken lessons were University-owned, the University would also own the sound recordings. Similar problems will face academics interested in music, drama and other subjects that involve recording equipment.
• Two computer science lecturers wrote and maintain a compiler whose unregistered trademark is made up of their names. The new regulations empower the University to register that trademark and control its use in the future.
• Suppose you are a professor of archaeology who has a collection of Roman artefacts, built up over twenty years and bought with your own money. You create a database of your collection and its context. This database will in future belong to the University, limiting your freedom to move elsewhere on retirement.
• When I was a research student, I financed my study by setting up the abstracts journal in my field, as a joint business venture with my thesis adviser. This would require University permission under the new regime; the University's ownership of database rights in the compilation, and of typographical rights in the publication, would give RSD a veto on such projects.
• The biological and clinical sciences may be worst affected, as RSD control of the database rights in all sequence data they produce will potentially poison all public-domain databases to which this data is contributed (such as the Human Genome project) and is also likely to entangle research collaborations with other organisations. In the Council debate on this, I pointed out that the University could sell its residual rights in such data to an entrepreneur such as Craig Venter who might then use it to mount a legal challenge to the database's public-domain status. As a result, the policy has been modified so that the University must consult with the creators of a database right before selling it to a third party - but the creators do not get a veto.

Some high-profile University academics will escape the effects of the new policy. For example, the next popular science book from Stephen Hawking will probably be unaffected - so long as the author is careful not to compile the index, but have it compiled by the publishers (so that only copyright, rather than database rights, are involved).

But these will be in the minority. Most academics either produce creative output spanning more than one kind of intellectual property right, or collaborate with externally-funded research students. In the case of academics whose work produces database material (such as DNA sequences) the new regulations could extinguish any entrepreneurial freedom, as well as the freedom to move to a better job elsewhere. In the case of academics whose work produces material such as designs or recordings that are claimed only when University equipment is used, a choice has to be made of whether to risk these rights or to buy all the necessary computers and other equipment out of one's own pocket. Given that the University has traditionally given academics free PCs and network access, this will be equivalent to a salary cut of several hundred pounds a year.

Economic Effects

So will the expropriation of Cambridge patents and other IP make money for the economy? Here too the evidence is strongly negative. The definitive study of the Cambridge Phenomenon argued that the large number of high-tech businesses spun off from the University owed a lot to the fact that academics own our patents and copyrights, so those who were inclined to doing business start-ups could do so without having to appease University bureaucrats at every step and hand over most of the resulting profits. The second edition remarked that it was probably already harder, from an IP perspective, for academics to drive spin-out creation. The Cambridge technology transfer scene is also very diverse at present; creating a University monopoly on academic IP is the worst thing that could happen for entrepreneurship. Most local `business angels' believe that drastically tightening Cambridge's IP regime will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

For more, including links to relevant academic research, see our detailed analysis of the 2002 policy.

Other Issues

There are many details in the policy that appear designed to supply the arbitrators and lawyers with work. For example, Regulation 20 says that if staff members cannot agree who made what share of an invention, any royalties will be split equally between them. In those fields where it's common for a senior researcher to provide 60% of the ideas and four junior staff 10% each, there will be a temptation for junior staff to dispute; once this is realised, the temptation will be for senior staff to involve as few juniors as they can. This will surely undermine trust, and the University's broader educational mission.

As our most recent Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston argues, the freedom to share information quickly, without hindrance from patent lawyers or bureaucrats, is critical to effective research. We must defend this freedom.

Ross Anderson

31st March 2004

The committee members of the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms are:

• Ross Anderson
• Michael Ashburner
• Mike Clark
• Simon Deakin
• Richard Evans
• David MacKay
• David Newbery

There has been significant press coverage of the first round of Cambridge's IP war, including articles in the Observer, the Telegraph, the Cambridge Evening News, ZDNET, THES, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC and Varsity.

There is a mailing list you can join, and there is also some discussion of the issue on the ucam.change.governance newsgroup. (We also have our own Dilbert :-)