Most first-year law students spend their time parsing the rule against perpetuities or trying to figure out what res ipsa loquitur really means.
Corynne McSherry wrote a book.
A refined version of her doctoral dissertation in communication at UC-San Diego, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001) presents snapshots of recent cases and debates. At a time when both universities and intellectual property law are undergoing dramatic changes, McSherry writes, “the university’s traditional service mission, once construed as an obligation to provide tools for public decision making, has been substantially redefined to mean the transfer of university research from academia to the market via patenting and licensing.” And she suggests that the new vision of scientific work is “a far cry from the open, ethical community of scholarship in which many scholars prefer to imagine they participate.”
McSherry interviewed more than 100 tenured professors, recent PhDs and graduate students, and looked at disputes around the country about ownership of websites and of lectures taped for distance-learning broadcasts. She found that many professors embrace the idea of spelling out rights and signing contracts: “Property ownership offers a kind of comfort in a world where many faculty see traditional prerogatives disappearing.”
Although McSherry, now a third-year student, is headed for a career as an intellectual property litigator, she clearly cares about the evolving campus climate. “I would like faculty, students and administrators to have conversations together to try to develop policies that promote the circulation of academic work,” she says. “They shouldn’t be conversations about drawing little pieces of the pie, but about figuring out what’s the best way to keep getting what they’ve produced out to the most people possible.”
