It hasn't always been this way. In the eighties, UC Berkeley was a pioneer in giving away software for the betterment of society. The rapid dissemination of "BSD Unix" allowed Internet-connected computers to speak the same language, helping to make our networked world possible.

But now the University of California is often mentioned as one of the institutions that have taken the craze for exclusive patents and licenses too far. "It changed in the late eighties and early nineties," says Susan Graham, a professor of computer science at Berkeley. She didn't remember there even being an Office of Technology Licensing back when the department gave away Unix and the Internet protocols.

If those innovations were discovered today, Graham worries they would end up in corporate hands. "I don't know whether they would let us release software like TCP/IP today," she says. "If they thought it had monetary value, they would want a revenue stream. There would be companies who could pay for it. I'm not sure we would have the same outcome [as in the past], and that's what concerns me."

The trend at universities toward trying to profit from intellectual property began with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Bayh-Dole allows institutions doing research for the federal government -- mostly universities -- to own the intellectual property they produce, and sell the rights to private companies. Because most cutting-edge research at both public and private universities involves some federal funding, Bayh-Dole allows universities to lay claim to many of their faculty's inventions. The same rights were later extended to the federal research labs.

The philosophy behind Bayh-Dole is economic stimulation through privatization. When the law passed, the federal government held roughly 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5 percent of these were licensed to industry for development of commercial products, according to the Council on Government Relations, a lobbying group for research universities. By giving contractors a chance to sell the rights to technology developed in the course of publicly funded research, Congress hoped to spark an economic boom with taxpayer-funded technology.

Overall, the model has been a dramatic success. The transfer of technology from university labs into offices, factories and stores was fundamental to the growth of Silicon Valley and the success of the new economy. Since 1980, university inventions licensed to the private sector under Bayh-Dole have spawned over 2,200 new companies that generate about $30 billion in economic activity every year, according to the Association of University Technology Managers.

Statistics like these explain the enduring enthusiasm among most policy experts for privatizing the public's intellectual property. But a few eloquent dissenters have begun to argue that taking privatization of the nation's intellectual property too far could stifle innovation and suffocate economic growth.

The champion of this broad thesis is Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, who has just outlined this argument in a new book, "The Future of Ideas." Lessig worries that the proper balance between private intellectual property (Microsoft) and the public good (the Internet) has been lost, and our society is blindly moving toward too much private control over intellectual property. "The shift is not occurring with the idea of balance in mind," he wrote; "instead, the shift proceeds as if control were the only value."

The most powerful examples that privatizing technology does not always equal progress are public code like the Internet's and open-source software. They are cases of technology that derive their value from being public and free; fences kill them. "The open-source movement is an endorsement of the value of the public domain," Eisenberg says. "It's a striking counter-example to the bias of public policy: that the public domain dooms technology to obscurity."

The systemic bias toward privatization, which Bayh-Dole codified into law, has the scientists working on improved versions of the Internet worried.

"For the last 20 years, public money has backed proprietary systems software," says Rick Stevens, who is working on "grid computing" software at Argonne National Lab. "We're saying, stop putting public money there."

Ian Foster, another computer scientist working at Argonne, agrees. "I believe that in almost all cases, the interests of science and society alike are best served by free distribution of software produced in research labs and universities. Unfortunately, there are still institutions that place significant obstacles in the way of researchers who wish to follow this path. Agencies funding research could help things by making strong statements in favor of open source, so that this is the norm rather than the exception."

Some government agencies are starting to get the message. Open-source development for grid software and other supercomputing applications is getting some government funding. The Department of Energy, which runs Argonne, has been supporting open-source projects for years. In April, the National Security Agency announced it would help to make a version of the Linux-based operating system secure enough for the Defense Department to use.

Universities are starting to rediscover the value of open-sourcing software, too. Stanford, the institution at the hub of Silicon Valley, lets its faculty release software under a public license. "We pretty much go with what our faculty members want to do," says Kathy Ku, who heads the licensing office there. "We care about the academic mission more that the money."

Elsewhere, the struggle goes on. "It's trying to find a balance between the academic mission and commercialization," Johnson, the Utah professor, says. "This is a hot topic in universities right now, and everyone is really struggling with it. Some universities have really gone overboard. It's not going to be an easy thing to resolve."

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