Who owns a scientist’s mind?
physicstoday.scitation.org
physicstoday.scitation.org
“But that means, if you’ll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it’s staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ’s sake. He talks to his wife about it. And, goddamn it, he doesn’t have any right to that information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn’t let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that’s what I do at five o’clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work.
“When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it’s the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We’re not even doing that. So we’re working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is—on our hard disks or even inside the programmers’ heads. Now, I can’t say more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won’t even be an issue.”
-- L. Bob Rife (from Snow Crash)
It's a price of doing business in information businesses that information leaks onto your employees.
What was interesting...
Apparently there's recently been a new stream of potential donors of a certain type, specifically they are very interested in donating towards specific types of research (there's nothing new here, giving to XXX institution to support cancer research has been happening forever). What is different, is that in exchange, THEY WANT THE IP AT THE END so that they may commercialize it.
Of course this is silly, the PI owns their IP and when it's transferred out it usually goes to the PI's company with some cut on future revenues going to the university...
I just thought it was amusing that there's people out there hangin' around universities, hoping to buy IP under the auspices of calling it charitable giving.
But sure, there's no harm in thought experiments. And we have a lot of different behaviors over time to look at from a range of institutions. You might start asking what changes when incentives are restructured to encourage short-term profit over discovery, and how that might change teaching and research universities.
For starters, an easy one: if revenue production becomes the primary measure of the value of a field, how does historical research pay its way while avoiding capture by particular interests?
Also, if you want to _really_ be daring, ask questions about what might happen if employees weren't forced by default into work-for-hire arrangements. What if corps were a bit more like academia?
When it comes to matters of research, it's rare in the American system that PIs take orders from the institution.
Patents were a standard affair: the university owned and paid for the patent, the researcher(s) (including the PI and grad students) got inventorship. In the eventuality of a licensing deal, university would get a 50% cut, the inventors would get the remaining 50%.
It was a significant revenue stream for the university.
The tricky part here is that if you call it a "gift" you don't get charged overhead, whereas you do if you call it contract research, which is what it actually is.
That is how capitalism and the free market are supposed to work. What gives one company, or a set of arbitrary companies, the right to hold wages down? Or to own the very mind of a person? To restrict that person from working elsewhere? To restrict that person from seeking justice in a court of law?
> The job already pays enough that everyone who can do the job will do the job for someone.
People have to eat and live, which is why they'll do the job for someone. But that shouldn't mean they can't seek out better offers.
The lack of someone to stop them.
Unions have been demonized so long that they're assumed to be universally bad, but a corporation is a collection of people and resources organized to pursue a goal their members couldn't pursue individually. One of the advantages they have is superior bargaining power. Corporations often take advantage of this power, corrupting the market.
A union is another organization of people and resources attempting to get more for its members through increased bargaining power. Sometimes they do this in a way that corrupts the market. But unions are inherently bad and are being driven to extinction, while corporations are inherently good and ever more powerful.
You may have missed the part about me doing this specifically so I can raise everyone's salaries, not because I'm sharing secrets or being a braggart or some mundane thing like that.
Again and again we find the greed of the corporation violates the spirit of why we've got any form copyright or patent. The Author and the Inventors don't own anything, the wealthy do.
It's been that way since the 16th Century (with the creation of a monopoly of printing given to the Worshipful Company of Stationers by Queen Mary I) through to the first 'modern' copyright act in the 18th Century, the Statute of Anne.
It seems to me time and again that the United States' priorities were in far better shape a hundred or so years ago.
I have to regularly remind myself that there was plenty of bad in the 'old days' because trends today, especially to boundless corporate power, are so deeply depressing.
And then you're back to how good the candidate's negotiating skills are, rather than that person's skill at whatever occupation you're hiring them into. Companies would rather not think too hard about the moral implications of trying to cheat someone out of what they're worth, though.
If you are a hiring manager, and this is policy, refuse to disrespect the experts you are hoping to entice.
Holy shit! I didn't even realize that was a prison-level crime.
It speaks volumes to the arrogance and greed running rampant through the highest echelons of our society.
Things have been going downhill dangerously fast in the tech explosion of the last 30 years. Our society's technical capabilities have fast outpaced the development of a societal wisdom that leads to healthy and ethical outcomes in terms of governing how and when tech should be utilized.
Should our off-balance society ever fall off the horse so much that even a half-hearted attempt is made to justify the theft of a man's right to his own mind in the name of intellectual property rights, I would wager things have deteriorated to the point where a metaphorical bullet to the head of whatever farce of a societal framework is in place at the time is warranted.
> Jennings, a talented electronic engineer, has accepted a secret contract with Rethrick Construction. The terms of the contract state that he will work for two years on a secret project after which he will have his memory of the time erased and will be paid an inordinate sum. It is implied that this type of working contract has replaced non-disclosure agreements in business and is commonplace.
To a large degree, the entire US has become that town in the old Western where the rich were above the law.
It strikes me as especially ironic now that people horde firearms against the day when their democratic rights are taken away. They're already gone.
the rights of the owner of the idea should never reach inside my head.
going further, if a file is in my personal disk which I physically control, the rights of the file's creator should never reach into my personal disk.
specially given that the file can exist in any number of disks.
For now, keeping things in your internal disk will protect them, but I can't imagine that's a permanent status quo.
If we keep advancing brain-computer interfaces, eventually you might not even be able to hide your dreams from your employer! Think about how much money companies will save on loss prevention if they have perfect, autonomous loss prevention built right into your brain stem! It'll be great for the economy.
I agree that it is, and in my opinion that's really terrible.
> There's more money to be made eroding your ownership of your own thoughts...
and what about real value? what happens to our collective hability to create novelty (and new value) if we double down on this path?
It's not quite that simple. What if that idea occurs as a result of work you've done for, or things you've learned from your, employer? Do they have NO claim to that, even if you decide to use it to compete against them?
Of course now I've seen news stories about fast-food workers having similar non-competes, so i guess it can always be worse.
Of course! The whole notion of a company owning every and all, things and thoughts, has to just die off. Everything outside the scope of the specific project is off-limits.
Ideas that occur as a result of the work I've done and things I've learned are mine! Ideas that are a part of the work I do are theirs.
A Square wheel, inc. tasks me with improvement on their design of Square wheel tech. I do that during my working hours, and I happily work on reducing the friction of the wheel. However, why would Square wheel, inc. have any claim to my novel idea of a vastly superior Round wheel tech that I thought up as I kicked a rock on a road? They didn't pay me to invent a new type of wheel, they asked me to improve their current one. I can choose to tell them the new idea, based on their sense of ethics and morals, i.e. whether I would receive a significant percentage of the proceeds, but the corporation has absolutely no entitlement to anything outside the scope.
Well, should not have, since apparently the greedy crooks actually feel that they control everything and everyone and have to have everything.
All interactions are multi-way. No one person or group can really claim the high ground in these interactions as all parties are part of the interaction and in some way or another contribute to the idea generation process.
Do your employers have a right to all that too? That would be ridiculous.
The catch? You have to pay the person you've quarantined throughout this ordeal, and the person you've quarantined can work at a restaurant or something and make two wages.