What happens if you lose? Is that the end of the whole dreaful row?
That’s unlikely, for several reasons. First, tenured staff will still have much better terms than contract staff, and once the principle of levelling down has been accepted (rather than levelling up) the temptation will be for the University to ask for more. Second, the injustice of treating technologists’ patents more severely than historians’ books will rankle. Third, the Cambridge Enterprise bureaucracy won’t make its budget – facing a choice between paying 15% tax to exploit an idea yourself or 67% tax to have it exploited by CE, you can be sure that the valuable ideas will be self-exploited and CE will end up with the turkeys. So the current share of patent income enjoyed by the centre will go down from about half to something near 15%. All these factors will create strong incentives for the centre to move against the next target – and Regulation 2 gives it the power to do so.The net effect is likely to be that IP will remain a running sore for years.
