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A very long shadow indeed. I had to insist on modifying a standard release agreement with the UC Regents in order to retain control over an oral history I gave to Bancroft Library on the early disability civil rights movement here in the late 60s to early 70s. If I hadn't insisted that all interviews were conditioned on that modification, then the UC Regents would own the rights to this history. Absurd, since the whole battle was against the university interest and was part of last War on Poverty programs from the Johnson administration to open higher education to disadvantaged students, i.e. minorities and disabled.
Similar IP battles were taken up by the old lefties in the Free Speech Movement and other political movements that put UCB on the historical map.
Much of this kind of thing is slowly becoming standard fare in some academic quarters, especially where potentially large amounts of money might be in the offing, such as patent rights, particularly in genetics and molecular biology.
In the early 90s I worked in the Plant and Microbial Biology Dept as a tech on a grant. The semmester after I left, the department sold all of its research rights to Norvartis in exchange for a private funding contract. The deal eventually lapsed and Norvartis didn't pursue another funding cycle. Their specific intent was to own the genome of arabidopis T. a small weed used extensively in plant genetics and molecular biology. The point. If you own the plant, you can patent every lab kit generated from the genome and sell such a lab kit at whatever price the market will bare. This is an example of how government and corporations can literally create a commody out nothing but law and contracts.
IMHO, with no evidence to back it up, I just assume that most of the great economic leap foreward of the 90s was composed of pure neoliberal bullshit like the above. A `product' is created by its legal or contractual definition---produced out of nothing and then, distributed, bought and sold as there was something there to point to, when in many cases there is nothing there, except the `right' to market access to something that prior to such a contract or law, was simply part of some public commons. This concept of economics is at the heart of the privatization of everything.
I am kind of surprized that some baby food company hasn't filed a lawsuit charging that nursing mothers violate their right to sell formula and should be re-imbursed by government a certain percentage of their lost profit for permitting such outrages against the American way and free enterprize.
CG