Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of 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, dangerously undercutting a working covenant that has sustained academic life for a century and a half.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Acronyms Introduction Chapter 1. Building an Epistemic Regime Chapter 2. An Uncommon Controversy Chapter 3. “University Lectures Are Sui Generis” Chapter 4. Metes and Bounds Chapter 5. Telling Tales Out of School Notes References Acknowledgments Index

About the Author :
Corynne McSherry is an attorney at Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco, CA. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego.

Review :
McSherry is concerned with the future of intellectual property at a time when universities continue to combine a place in the market economy with their traditional role in a gift economy. Her second worry is the flip side: what will be the effect on universities as our standards and definitions of intellectual property change, especially given the way the public domain is eroding?...The book provokes much thought about issues that most academic scientists likely do not consider in much depth--copyright, patent and data ownership, and the "work-for-hire" exclusion of individual employee's rights in the US...McSherry ably demonstrates that universities are going through a second revolution. Academics should be wary of what that revolution may bring. -- Steven M. Bachrach New Scientist 20011201 This book provides not a legal but a cultural analysis of the social production of academic knowledge...[McSherry] forces us to look at the data stream of modern society that passes through a series of institutions, all of which attempt to enforce conflicting ownership claims. When a professor delivers a lecture to students, is he or she making a "gift" to the world in general? Or to the community of students concerned? Or does the professor retain the ownership of everything in the lecture?...This is a highly stimulating work. -- Anthony Smith Times Higher Education Supplement 20020202 This collection of essays...asks us to consider who has the legal and social right to academic freedom in theory and practice, and what conditions are put in place to limit or enable that freedom to exist. This is a collection of essays about the limitations of academic freedom, but it is equally a collection about the social nature of the university...The collection does what it sets out to do: provoke the reader into participating in this important ongoing dialogue...Anyone working in academia, in any capacity, should think about these issues and enter into the critical dialogue of which these texts are a part, thus ensuring we put theory into practice. -- Batia Boe Stolar Canadian Literature