Intellectual Property—What's Yours Is Mine

TAKING ANOTHER SHOT
This isn't the first attempt to improve engineers' invention rights. That started some years ago with the National Society of Professional Engineers in California, but eventually fell through the cracks for lack of interest and followup. (However, the NSPE, a national society of engineering professionals from all disciplines with about 58,000 members, offers a "recommended" four-page IP agreement on its Web site that it says is designed to protect the rights and privileges of both the company and the employee.)

In 1970, legislation was introduced to Congress in a bill authored by Congressman John E. Moss of California. The Moss bill was rewritten several times and assigned to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Patents and Trademarks. But it never actually received a hearing. Moss retired and no one picked up the legislative cudgel until 1963, when California Congressman George Brown introduced legislation to make pre-assignment IP agreements an unfair labor practice. But the bill never received a hearing.

The IEEE-USA and its IP Committee have been working on this issue since 1975. Its current effort is based largely on research that produced the Moss bill, and which an IEEE spokesman says "aligns well" with the feedback the group is now getting from working engineers. But in anything involving politics, numbers count. The IEEE plan includes a significant publishing effort to build and mobilize a constituency and ensure that there is a consensus on the issues.

Kuntz calls the pre-invention assignment one of many issues facing America's knowledge management in a competitive world market. The challenge, he says, is "just another part of the treatment of intellectual human capital as a disposable commodity instead of the nation's most valuable asset."

"The focus," says Kuntz, "is to effect change, not just produce more rhetoric on the subject." He says there already is a debate over whether there should be a federal government strategy or a multiplicity of state laws, even before the scope of any law is resolved. (Eight states—California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington—already have pre-invention assignment laws written into their labor codes). Kuntz says, "There is frustration at the federal level, but with the complexity of the issue and interstate commerce, this requires a federal law."