Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (review)

Corynne McSherry, a law student at Stanford University, explores the complicated world of intellectual property rights and copyright law. In Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property she concentrates on several cases in the sciences that gained national attention because of their court battles and outcomes. McSherry was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Prize by Harvard University Press for the best first book of the year published by the press.

McSherry poses questions regarding the differences between public universities and private companies. How do the rights of scholars differ from those of engineers or scientists in the private sector? Who owns what a researcher produces in a lab, and how can originality be proven? Are academics living in a world that is no longer valid? Should academic work be owned at all, or should it be available for free-flowing intellectual discussions and research?

She begins the work by examining the law and the definitions of property and intellectual property rights in flux in a world of increasing technological communication. The monetary stakes in the sciences and in patent work changed the playing field at the end of the twentieth century and continue to do so at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Private companies who will pay for or buy work now play a larger part in decisions made by some in academics than they may have in prior generations.

Academic work, often funded by grants from the government or foundations, is especially tricky in today's legal and political venues. Through discussions of several recent cases, McSherry explores the notion of the academic work as a gift. She grapples with the notions of academic freedom and academic work, once taken for granted at institutions of higher education. McSherry explores how universities take away the rights of researchers through sometimes little-known or little-read clauses in policy documents. She also explores what happens when lab members leave the university with knowledge of experiments that they have worked on through grants and research partnerships.

McSherry hits the center of controversies being played out on campuses across the county, in courtrooms, and often on the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Junior researchers fight for what they believe is their research, while a system that grants them access to a lab views the work as property either of the university or of the lead senior researcher who obtained the grant. The Internet has further complicated an already complicated system. Notes are freely distributed in cyberspace, sometimes without the knowledge of those who originally produced them. Issues of copyright in the digital age are still being worked out in the courts, and the boundaries remain unclear.

This book raises thought-provoking questions for the twenty-first century. Even though Corynne McSherry concentrates on the scientific community for examples, this is a book that all academics should pay attention to and read.