Inside Higher Education has an interesting article about a court case currently being appealed that may have wide-ranging consequences for college professors -- whether their employers (the colleges and universities where they work) can legally and unilaterally claim ownership of their scholarly work:

Some experts say that granting ownership of all intellectual property to an institution will harm academic freedom. Ann Springer, associate counsel for the American Association of University Professors, which filed a brief on the dispute, said that if colleges own their professors’ works, then they are also responsible for the content.

“They would have to review everything that is written,” she said, adding that if the university were considered responsible for content, it might seek to contain controversial content. . . . She added that faculty members would have far less incentive to innovate if the institution could claim full ownership of their work.

In court proceedings, the Board of Regents maintained that, because faculty members are expected to produce intellectual property as part of their employment, the “work for hire” provision of copyright law guides intellectual property policy, and it need not be negotiated. . . . Much the way Microsoft owns computer codes written by its employees, the court classified scholarly work as within the scope of employment of a faculty member, and thus granted ownership to the institution.

This would be a pretty scary thought, that universities can own (and therefore keep all benefits) from the work that professors produce. I can see that as employees of the universities, professors are paid to do scholarly work. However, the argument that the university then owns all rights to the work is rather dubious because they university already benefits in other ways from professors’ work, in terms of status, prestige, and reputation in the academic world.

I can’t help but see this as another example of academic and scholarly work is slowly being corporatized in the name of capitalism.