Paul Graham has a new essay on the challenges of concepts of property that don’t work. For instance, ownership of smells, which might work on a moonbase selling air with distinctive scents to people, but strikes us as a foolish use of property here on earth. Graham compares this with the problems in the music and movie industries, where claims of ownership have been extended to a range of new forms of copying and transmission:
Ultimately it comes down to common sense. When you’re abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that’s ipso facto evidence you’re using a definition of property that doesn’t work.
Universities haven’t quite gotten so far as mass lawsuits, but they are pushing a claim to property that extends beyond mere inventions (which is bad enough) to include know how, expertise, and the like. These are forms of property that “don’t work” in university research settings. There is only so far one can go forcing the issue with policy demands.
With regard to the music and movie industries, Graham argues that there is a problem of “short-term greed”:
the underlying problem with the labels and studios is that the people who run them are driven by bonuses rather than equity. If they were driven by equity they’d be looking for ways to take advantage of technological change instead of fighting it. But building new things takes too long. Their bonuses depend on this year’s revenues, and the best way to increase those is to extract more money from stuff they do already.
Something similar is going on at our universities. The “equity” that matters is the long-term value of the university’s activities to the community, as evidenced by the many ways in which university faculty, staff, and students take up the challenges of the community and assist, and discover and develop new things that people find, later, of value. Cash from licensing university-claimed inventions is a form of bonus. Building the new things, the technological and social change by which research and community engage–that apparently takes too long. How long? Perhaps a decade or more. And how long does it take to undermine those relationships and put people and their organizations back a score of years in terms of trust? Maybe a year or two.
How much are university administrators undoing in terms of long-term public trust–equity in universities–simply by transmogrifying faculty dedication of IP to the university as an agent into a university demand based on employment? That sort of change reflects a move from institutional equity culture to bonus culture. The dull shock, then, is to realize that the change advocated by administrators from dedication of IP to employment demand also changes the royalty sharing schedule from the part the inventors are dedicating to the university–part of equity culture–to a pitch by the university that faculty also adopt the bonus culture the administrators have adopted. In this way, text that itself doesn’t change, such as a royalty sharing policy, comes to represent something entirely different as the circumstances around it change. This is one of the great defects of piece-meal change of university IP policies, especially when some pieces of the change are defective or inept and later changes attempt to harmonize those defects into something that at least sounds coherent, as if non-contradictoriness is a sign that the policy must have been “improved”.