"Arthur J. Kendall" wrote:
Isn't this part of the same problem as intellectual property
> going to any employer? In recent years increasingly many companies
> and universities grab onto the ideas of professionals and treat
> then as corporate property.
Yes, and the dirty bloodsucking capitalist bosses grab onto the coal
that the workers mine and treat it as corporate property too. Come the
Worker's Revolution, all that will be put a stop to, Brothers and
Sisters. But till then we don't rate different treatment by calling
ourselves "professionals".
There are good reasons why universities, in particular, do not usually
claim certain sorts of intellectual property produced by their faculty -
in particular, the fact that much of it (most research) is unmarketable
and much of the rest (writing textbooks) might not get done if the
author were not to get paid. Note that contracts usually spell this out
carefully - because it is not the default situation for an employee.
It is no more axiomatic that a professor keeps the rights to a textbook
written on university time than that he/she keeps the rights to the
final grades from his/her classes. (Were the latter the case, one could
presumably (say) negotiate a fee to release them to the Registrar, or
alternatively sell the list to a local newspaper instead - a clear
_reductio_ _ad_ _absurdum_.) It's a matter of enlightened self-interest
on both sides.
-Robert Dawson
.
.
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