Intellectual Property In Academia

This book provides a practical understanding of intellectual property basics relevant in an academic environment. It describes the process of performing a comprehensive prior art search, determining business value, filing for a patent, licensing to companies, and using follow-up patents to create a valuable portfolio. The text also covers starting a new business and recent changes in patent application procedures. A special chapter addresses issues in copyright law relevant to academics, such as determining what is copyrightable in reporting an industry-sponsored project.

Who owns academic work? This question is provoking political and legal battles, fought on uncertain terrain, for ever-higher stakes. The posting of faculty lecture notes on commercial Web sites is being hotly debated in multiple forums, even as faculty and university administrators square off in a battle for professorial copyright. In courtrooms throughout the country, universities find themselves embroiled in intricate and expensive patent litigation. Meanwhile, junior researchers are appearing in those same courtrooms, using intellectual property rules to challenge traditional academic hierarchies. All but forgotten in these ownership disputes is a more fundamental question: should academic work be owned at all? Once characterized as a kind of gift, academic work--and academic freedom--are now being reframed as private intellectual property. Drawing on legal, historical, and qualitative research, Corynne McSherry explores the propertization of academic work and shows how that process is shaking the foundations of the university, the professoriate, and intellectual property law. The modern university's reason for being is inextricably tied to that of the intellectual property system. The rush of universities and scholars to defend their knowledge as property dangerously undercuts a working covenant that has sustained academic life--and intellectual property law--for a century and a half. As the value structure of the research university is replaced by the inequalities of the free market, academics risk losing a language for talking about knowledge as anything other than property. McSherry has written a book that ought to deeply trouble everyone who cares about the academy.

Presuming no background knowledge of intellectual property, and ending with a call to action, The Branding of the American Mind explores applicable laws, legal regimes, and precedent in plain English, making the book appealing to anyone concerned for the future of higher education.

A comprehensive overview of intellectual property law, this handbook will be a vital read for all invested in the field of IP law. Topics include the foundations of IP law; its emergence and development in various jurisdictions; its rules and principles; and current issues arising from the existence and operation of IP law in a political economy.

In order to determine the most effective management methods WIPO carried out a survey amongst universities and independent research institutions to determine the present practices and bottlenecks in the field of university Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management. The results are grouped around three main areas: technology transfer organizations, research and academic IPR management and transfer of technology. Created guidelines provide insight into such vital aspects of management as: managing patent portfolios, choosing the most effective commercialization strategy, technology management and others. This Study is targeted at universities, technology professionals, scientists, IPR professionals and patent attorneys, innovation agents, innovative SMEs and other entities interested in assisting the utilization and commercialization of the economically valuable IPRs.

As companies and organisations increasingly operate across national boundaries, so the incentive to understand how to acquire, deploy and protect IP rights in multiple national jurisdictions has rapidly increased. Transnational Intellectual Property Law meets the need for a book that introduces contemporary intellectual property as it is practiced in today’s global context. Focusing on three major IP regimes – the United States, Europe and China – the unique transnational approach of this textbook will help law students and lawyers across the world understand not only how IP operates in different national contexts, but also how to coordinate IP protection across numerous national jurisdictions. International IP treaties are also covered, but in the context of an overall emphasis on transnational coordination of legal rights and strategies.

This text reports and discusses the results of a three year long empirical, legal and philosophical investigation into the ownership and exploitation of intellectual property rights by universities in the UK, the USA and Australia. It reviews and compares the intellectual property regimes and academic traditions within which these universities operate, and evaluates the differing policy approaches which these institutions have adopted to the ownership and exploitation of intellectual property created under their auspices. It concludes with a consideration of desirable alternative approaches that might be adopted to these matters in the future.

Explore the different forms that intellectual property (IP) has taken in higher education in recent years and how to navigate the changing landscape for faculty members and university administrators. Due to technological advancements and the rise of neo-liberal policies influenced by academic capitalism, faculty members are finding their rights being renegotiated, often without their input. Through patents, copyrights, distance education programs and MOOCS, universities and publishers are seeking to gain a competitive advantage in a market largely dominated by profit generation. All this is putting the university’s public mission in tension with increasingly profit-driven university management practices. This volume: Presents policy trends in university IP regulation over the past 40 years, Examines the utility of IP rights in higher education, Considers the implications of knowledge ownership in the academic profession. and Details the IP barriers that faculty encounter when attempting to share their work. This is the 177th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Higher Education. Addressed to presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other higher education decision makers on all kinds of campuses, it provides timely information and authoritative advice about major issues and administrative problems confronting every institution.