“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.”
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.
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.
There's a lot of that, actually. It was trendy for a while for unis to try to monetize their research, and a lot of people became unhappy in various ways - researchers pissed off about the giveaways and being told whom they could talk to, donors who got patent rights for things that were really only useful for trolling, and university admins who were dreaming of riches and didn't get much aside from various people yelling at them.
I dunno if just cracks me up as it's so brazen- it's like they want to try and hire professors to do their R&D for them and assume that said professors will just hand it all over if anything valuable comes from their life's work.
As an industry employee the IP of your work belongs to your employer, I don't think it's a given that it should necessarily be different in research/academia. It is, obviously, and I think overall that's good, but we shouldn't take it for granted. There's nothing wrong with questioning the status quo.
As you note, there have been different norms in different institutions, and if you're a used to working for for-profit entities, I'm sure the norms you're used to seem, well, normal.
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?
Employer-employee relationships are very different from PI-institution relationships. PIs operate like little businesses within an institution. They write their own grants for their own funding. Sometimes the institution coughs up some corn, but usually it goes the other way. The institution extracts overheads from grant funds to pay for infrastructure.
When it comes to matters of research, it's rare in the American system that PIs take orders from the institution.
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.
When I was a course grader at my university years back, I had to sign a form saying any IP I invented during that time was owned by the university. Yes for grading homework, I have to assign all IP right to them.
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.
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.
There's lots of IP shenanigans, and it's not axiomatically true that the PI owns their IP. My university, which is a pretty middle of the road state school, has several people who work on this full time, and they're genuinely busy.
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.
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.
That's because it doesn't work. The job already pays enough that everyone who can do the job will do the job for someone. So paying more just means poaching staff from somewhere else. Someone is going to be the losing bidder
> So paying more just means poaching staff from somewhere else. Someone is going to be the losing bidder
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.
> What gives one company, or a set of arbitrary companies, the right to hold wages down?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I've done similar things when I was in a position to, and held my nose and signed when I wasn't. It sucks that bargaining position has become a substitute for legal rights.
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.
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.
This has always worked for me. My employers have only cared that they fully own all code that they pay me to write and are willing to change the language of the contract to make that clear.
I've never gotten a company to actually change terms, but I have turned them down on that basis. I would say, make sure you look for jobs while you either still have one, or have comfortable savings. That way you can hold out for what you want instead of having to take what comes along.
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.
Exploding offers are bullshit (a meaningless scare tactic, almost never enforced) and you should politely but explicitly make it clear that you know this. At the offer stage, all the power is in your hands.
If you are a hiring manager, and this is policy, refuse to disrespect the experts you are hoping to entice.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
I think it's a mistake to combine progress in human rights and economic rights. While people worked towards greater civil rights, corporations worked to enhance their own power at everyone else's expense. They just happened at the same time.
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.
That's an unrealistic forward standard as society is now. There's more money to be made eroding your ownership of your own thoughts and ideas than there is societal will to defend you. We've graduated from an "information economy" to an "attention economy" after all. Since attention is a resource to be pumped out of our skulls just like oil, what should prevent the rest of us from being farmed?
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 read it when I was far too young to have done so, but thoroughly enjoyed it. After seeing it mentioned twice on this thread and Seveneves mentioned on /. yesterday, I'm more than inclined to reread the former or pick up the latter this Summer.
> 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?
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.
>Do they have NO claim to that, even if you decide to use it to compete against them?
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.
Do they have a claim? Maybe. But they do have a moral claim? This is the interesting area. From my perspective, they have no more claim over your use of any ideas that you may have picked up from your time with them as you can claim from them picking up your ideas from your time with them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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)