
Who owns a scientist’s mind? - digital55
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3972
======
akincisor
“I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who
“interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than
normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes
through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database
passes through my networks. The Metaverse—the entire Street—exists by virtue
of a network that I own and control.

“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)

~~~
wodenokoto
I get the comparison, but I think it is simply wrong. Knowledge based business
are different from factories.

It's a price of doing business in information businesses that information
leaks onto your employees.

~~~
karthikb
Knowledge leaks onto employees even in factories. That's why a welder with 30
years of experience is different than one that is fresh out of trade school.
Better knowledge of tools, techniques, etc. You could hire a senior welder and
set up your own operation from scratch.

------
a-dub
It's actually quite interesting. I had beers with a development officer for a
major research university a few months ago. To me, this was a fascinating
opportunity to "learn about how the world really works" so I had all sorts of
silly questions like "how much do people pay to buy their child an undeserved
spot in an incoming class" and whatever. That replies were silly, but not
particularly interesting.

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.

~~~
auxym
At the university where I did my MS, the university owned the IP.

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.

~~~
psykotic
Yes, there are lots of famous examples. E.g. John Chowning invented FM
synthesis for musical applications but had to assign the patent to Stanford
where he worked as a researcher: "The FM patent produced about $22.9 million
in royalties for Stanford University (largely via the sale of FM chips for
soundcards)." With a patent date of 1975 and a duration of 20 years, they must
have received royalties until 1995 off every OPL family chip (used in Ad Lib,
Sound Blaster, etc) and all the Yamaha instruments based on FM synthesis (I
believe Yamaha had an exclusive license in that market). That's just one
particular example I happened to remember, but every tech-focused university
probably has a large portfolio of these sorts of patents.

~~~
icebraining
Stanford also owns the original PageRank patent, and licensed it to Google for
1.8 million shares. Apparently they sold those in 2005, earning $336 million.

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DannyB2
Companies will do ANYTHING to try to hire and retain the best people -- except
pay them well and treat them well.

~~~
imh
Not all companies, just most. I didn't believe it existed before I got to my
current gig, but there are some silicon valley companies that pay well and
treat workers well. It would take a hell of a lot for me to leave.

~~~
confounded
Are you treated well in terms of your intellectual freedoms? Are your rights
preserved in your employment contract?

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kevin_b_er
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries."

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.

~~~
M2Ys4U
Copyright (and associated rights) have _always_ been about _control_.

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.

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_bxg1
This is my number one criteria for a job offer. I will not sign anything that
brings into question my right to freely pursue creative projects in my own
time. I'm fortunate that, as a programmer, I am in the minority of the
population that actually has some bargaining power when it comes to employment
contracts.

It seems to me time and again that the United States' priorities were in far
better shape a hundred or so years ago.

~~~
calebh
Do you have any tips on how to make this happen? When I graduated I felt like
I didn't have much leverage on the job offer, but now that I have a couple
years of experience I think I can negotiate a better deal.

~~~
legohead
begin with having multiple offers in hand.

~~~
deathanatos
And in practice, this is quite difficult when companies only hand out
"exploding" offers.

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.

~~~
jchw
Don't accept exploding offers. Ever. It's a scam.

------
bonniemuffin
"In one famous 2009 case, Sergey Aleynikov, a former programmer for Goldman
Sachs, was arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to eight years in prison
without parole for stealing trade secrets. The trade secret in question was
code he had written himself, then backed up onto cloud storage while he was
still an employee. There was no evidence he had accessed the code since
leaving Goldman Sachs."

Holy shit! I didn't even realize that was a prison-level crime.

~~~
otoburb
The article doesn't mention the rest of Aleynikov's history, but he served one
year in prison[1] until his NY Supreme Court acquittal.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov)

~~~
ljw1001
Better than what he was sentenced to, but a year in prison is a long, long
time.

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salawat
The fact this question is even being asked is horrifying.

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.

------
JorgeGT
The extreme was already explored by Philip K. Dick in his 1952 short story
_Paycheck:_
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paycheck_(short_story)](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paycheck_\(short_story\))

> _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._

~~~
pimmen
Wow, didn't know that the godawful Ben Affleck movie was actually based on
something! I will give it a read.

~~~
JorgeGT
There seems to be a trend... Schwarzenegger's _Total Recall_ , Nick Cage's
_Next_ , Matt Damon's _The Adjustment Bureau_ , etc. are all based on Philip
K. Dick stories. But fortunately some adaptations have turned quite good:
_Blade Runner_ , _A Scanner Darkly_ , _Minority Report_ , _The Man in the High
Castle_...

~~~
chrisbennet
It was a bit of chick-flick I guess but I liked "The Adjustment Bureau". Call
me a romantic..

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ilovetux
I often felt that 19th century law was usually more humane. I mean, yes human
rights were violated on a racial, cultural and financial basis, but if you
were in the in-group then you actually had rights. It seems like once we
started earnest movements towards civil rights then the legal discrimination
was pushed back to just the financial front, so I guess that's a net gain for
most but we still have work to do.

~~~
gretj
The in-group still actually has rights. Cutoff for membership seems to be
around $100M.

~~~
ilovetux
Yes but hard-working middle class people are not in the in-group like they
once were.

~~~
olefoo
There was a brief post-war era where that was the case. But that era ended in
1973 [1]

1\. [https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-
gap/](https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)

~~~
mjevans
I think it 'ended' before that and that's just the rot starting to set in to
provide actual proof.

------
naringas
If an idea is in my head, nobody else but me should should be able to control
this idea.

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.

~~~
ams6110
> If an idea is in my head, nobody else but me should should be able to
> control this idea.

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?

~~~
ljw1001
If you're in an enlightened state like CA, you may think things are not so
bad. In MA, a low-level programmer working on, say, banking software, can be
prevented for up to three years from working at another banking software
company. Keep in mind, that experience is the prime driver of a person's
ability to earn more money over time. I'm not talking about stealing secrets
or brilliant insights. I'm talking about basic knowledge of how the banking
industry works.

Of course now I've seen news stories about fast-food workers having similar
non-competes, so i guess it can always be worse.

------
pjungwir
It's pretty cool to see this article mention Polanyi, who is very pertinent I
think. Yes, he wrote about tacit knowledge as something not formalizable. But
it's not just that. His goal was to protect scientists' freedom from Soviet
goals of centrally planned discoveries. Science doesn't work that way, he
argued. And it seems similar ideas can be applied to these employment
contracts: the company gets benefits while the scientist is employed, but once
they leave, the new directions of their research are unpredictable, and
shouldn't be owned or controlled by non-competes etc. That's a pretty vague
connection, but I feel like someone could develop it further.

------
pimmen
A friend of mine was put into quarantine a while ago, that's what you can do
in Sweden if you want to prevent people from going to the competitor.
Basically, you can't work for any other employer that competes with your
previous employer doing what you used to do.

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.

~~~
M2Ys4U
This is known as "Garden(ing) Leave" in British English:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave)

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nikofeyn
this made me think of the book _disciplined minds_. while not directly related
and is more focused on behavioral, managerial, and systematic issues, it is a
very interesting look into who controls the direction of research, work, and
perspectives.

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davidw
In the case of Albert Einstein, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and the
National Museum of Health and Medicine.

