A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew Magee.
Hello and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, where we hope to keep you up to date with the latest news and the most fascinating features from the world of technology law.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week we ask: are universities too obsessed with the cash they can earn from research?
But first, the news:
Children's bulletin board publishers must register operators and Broadcasters' video catch up service closed down over competition fears.
From October Organisations with interactive websites likely to be used mainly by children must ensure that staff moderating those sites are not barred from working with children. It will be a criminal offence for an organisation to knowingly employ a barred person for a regulated role, such as moderating children's sites.
The Government is changing the way that it controls who has access to children and vulnerable adults and the new laws take effect on 12 October. Those make the moderation of online services such as bulletin boards a regulated activity.
A video-on-demand joint venture involving the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV has been blocked by the competition commission. Project Kangaroo will not now be permitted to go ahead.
The venture was designed to become a single point of access for those TV companies' content, and would have been the Video-On-Demand (VOD) distribution point for almost all UK-made television.
The Competition Commission though has said that it could not foresee any action that would save the venture from being anti-competitive, and it has ordered that it not be allowed to proceed.
The BBC said that it would now focus its efforts on its existing VOD delivery service, Iplayer. It is not expected that the companies behind the venture will appeal the ruling to the Competition Appeal Tribunal.
That was this week's OUT-LAW news.
Academics' performance used to be measured by the number of articles they had published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. These days thought currency for Kudos – in technical disciplines at least can be patented.
Readying your research for a business or industrial application is now a major academic aim and universities have gone ga-ga for commercialisation. Chancellors and Deans go weak at the knees at stories of Google's contribution to Stanford’s top line or the amount that M.I.T might earn from gadgets invented there.
But is this healthy? And what is the purpose of the rush to commercialise – should our academic institutions really be chasing the big bucks, pushing out their precious only commodity - Intellectual Property - to the uncaring market? And what about the students who work on inventions – did they deserve a cut of the action?
These are difficult questions, and universities themselves are beginning to diverge in their attitudes and approaches to intellectual property exploitation.
How do we know? Well, because the Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University, Paul Wellings says so. He was asked by the Government to look into how universities create, treat and exploit their Intellectual Property or IP. He says that organisations that get seduced by big, glamorous spin offs like Google are missing the point.
Wellings: On a naïve level you can get carried away because you looking at those sort of headline, blockbuster deals, the interesting statistic that comes out when you, when you look at the literature of university business interactions currently in the United States, there are, there are about 20,000 licences between Universities and businesses. Only one in a 1,000 has generated more than a million US dollars return for the university.
There are two ideas about the commercialisation of research by universities. One is that it is a useful way to earn money to bolster third level education's budgets at a time when universities say the cash is sorely needed. The other is more public spirited, less financially driven, and has the full support of Wellings.
Wellings: The simplest epitome is are our universities doing it because they think that they are going to generate an additional income stream to add to the income streams they’ve already got, or are universities doing it because they are adding value to UK PLC in some way because they are making sure that the full value is captured from the extensive research that goes on very often tax payer funded research within universities. I am firmly in the latter camp. I think that our role is to add value to UK PLC by finding the route to adoption for our ideas and if that involves a service or a product that ends up being commercialised in the marketplace in some way, I think that is a good thing to have happened and if there is a reward that comes back to the university in terms of, you know, licensing or something like that. That’s happen chance and a happy event but I don’t think that should be the raison d'etre for doing it within the universities.
Chris Martin is a lawyer specialising in Universities and Research at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW. He could not agree more with Wellings.
Martin: I think universities are aware that technology transfer means more than just licensing intellectual property in order to generate a revenue stream, I think they are aware that they do have an obligation to try and make sure the output of the research are put to use in wider society. I think what Paul Wellings was saying was it would be quite good from a top down basis for the Government to actually come out and say, “yes, that is what we expect of you”.
Wellings said that there isn't really a problem with third level education policy, but in practice some organisations are more focused on the earnings than the social benefits of commercialisation.
What everyone agrees on, though, is that the process of commercialisation through technology transfer offices has become a major part of University life over the past fifteen years.
Wellings: Over the last fifteen years has been a massive change in emphasis around trying to understand the intellectual property coming out of university research activities and other activities and that's caused every institution to respond by setting up offices and if you look at the comparative data now for the United Kingdom, I think that in terms of numbers of staff who are involved in licensing IP we're very similar to the USA, Canada and Australia. They are all roughly in the same place in terms of the investments that we are making.
What institutions must realise, though, is that the cost of this activity will not always be covered by its earnings, said Martin.
Martin: In reality it is difficult to make a profit from commercialising the outputs of university research. You know, I think history tells us that the costs of actually running a technology transfer office probably outweigh any revenue, you know, licence revenue stream that you make from licensing the university's IP portfolio.
What about the people who actually create these innovations? What are their rights? University staff are in the same position as employees of any other company: anything they make on work time belongs to their employer. Postgraduate students on a university project which is funded through the university are in a similar position.
Undergraduates are sometimes asked to assign their rights to the university, but that is very rare, said Wellings.
The group that he thinks might be at risk are those that fall between the undergrads and the staff: people studying for one year masters degrees.
Wellings: In the case of students doing one year masters courses, there is a lot more ambiguity there. There will be some students, especially in areas where you might have rapid product development like design areas or computing areas where students assign IP. The adequate compensations side, I think, is pretty clear because there are staff policies and they apply to students. The fully informed consent and understanding, I think, is again that gap between what does the policy say and what does the implementation say and there is a little bit of evidence, I think, to suggest that universities could be a bit sharper in creating training opportunities for students so that they understood why they were being asked to assign, so there was a learning process associated with this and to make it clear that it was in their gift to say no if they wanted to say no.
Martin agrees that universities need to be clear about who owns what.
Martin: Universities have to address this issue and what is important is the different way they take to approach that. It would be quite helpful if you communicate more clearly to students what their rights are and what the university’s policies are on Intellectual Property. Institutions actually have built into their matriculation terms and conditions provisions which state that any IP generated by either undergraduate students or postgraduate students will be owned by the university and I think that is a difficult one to justify and both from a legal and commercial perspective.
In his extensive report Wellings concludes that the research universities produce should benefit the greater good – that, he says means much more than just producing fat cheques for individual universities.
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening. Can you think of a story you would like OUT-LAW Radio to cover? We'd love to hear from you on radio@out-law.com. Make sure you tune in next week; for now, goodbye.
OUT-LAW Radio was produced and presented by Matthew Magee for international law firm Pinsent Masons.