Panos Ipeirotis recently wrote about the confusing state of affairs with respect to intellectual property at his University. In some sense, this is ironic, since the whole point of a University is to produce intellectual property. But I suppose the question isn’t really one of production, but rather of distribution and of consumption. It’s clear that the faculty and students who develop the ideas should own (i.e., receive credit for) those ideas. But once an idea is published, how it gets used is a different story.

With others (e.g., Christopher Browne) I have often wondered why a public university (or a private one that receives significant federal funding for research) has any rights to patent the results of its research. After all, government employees are not allowed to patent the results of their work done for the government; why should government-funded work at universities be different?

Furthermore, does it matter to a University to hold patents, particularly software patents?

In terms of the value of intellectual property for running a business, my sense is that it matters little. A patented algorithm that is provably 10% better than its nearest public-domain competitor (a wonderful research accomplishment in many areas) is generally going to play a smaller role in the success is a business than other factors such as the skill with which the business plan is put together, the quality of management, corporate culture, and a host of others. Furthermore, many of the costs associated with software lie in maintenance, integration with other systems, and support, rather than in the development of patentable algorithms. In short, IP, particularly software IP, is rarely a significant enabler. (There are of course exceptions.)

So if the intellectual property associated with software does not have high commercial value, why should a university spend its meager resources protecting it? The opportunity cost is too high.

So what about Google, you ask. Google was incubated Stanford University, and has quickly become one of the world’s biggest corporations. Is it an example of why a university should protect its IP so that it can derive financial benefit in the long run?

Here again, I think the case is not that clear. First of all, at the time that Sergei Brin and Larry Page were working on their research, the lab in which they worked was a major recipient of NSF funding for Digital Libraries. Sergei and Larry build a good implementation of an algorithm described earlier by Jon Kleinberg, which he developed while at IBM. They then executed an effective business plan to make the company a lot of money, quite a bit of which they donated back to the University, and to other causes as well. Stanford, however, can’t really claim ownership of the IP.

In short, I think University professors should not worry as much about owning the revenue stream from the ideas they create as about owning the idea itself. Those who are truly interested in making money probably shouldn’t have gone into academia (it’s hard to make up the 10+ years of lost income), and those whose ideas are truly important should have less trouble getting tenure, with all the benefits that confers.

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