Why lawyers are indispensable to S&T
To all budding engineers and scientists (engineer scientist included too!), read on.
What is it that brings science and law together? Of course, on the surface it may seem that scientific and legal personnel are like oil and water. Nevertheless, oil and water do mix together under certain conditions, and that is also the case with business, law and science (I think here in NUS they call it technopreneurship). They all converge together on the subject of Intellectual Property (IP), a domain which would already be familiar to any who follows the news in the computing industry. To address the blank stares I’m getting, think patents and trade secrets (and to a lesser extent, publications).
All right, I guess that would suffice as a brief intro. In this month’s Science, there is a new monthly column titled Opportunities: Intellectual Property and I’ve just read Part 1. I think many of you would find this article useful in the long run. Using the example of Shuji Nakamura (don’t worry, not many people know about him and his important invention) the article’s author stressed the importance of knowing how to defend your IP.
FYI, Mr. Nakamura was an employee at Nichia Corp in Japan who invented the blue LED. You may laugh at the notion of the blue LED being considered a major invention, but it’s not as easy as it seems. You see, before the blue LED discovery, there is only red and green LEDs. So there’s no white LEDs because you don’t have all three RGB colours and there are physical difficulties in trying to get LEDs that emit sustained blue light (and not UV instead). Thus the invention of the blue LED enables white LEDs to be made (although other alternatives are used to create white LEDs today). Therefore, at the time of discovery the blue LED was of some major significance. Thanks to his invention we are getting higher density storage devices (does Blu-Ray ring a huge enough bell?).
Guess what Nichia Corp awarded him for his genius.
A few tens of millions of dollars?
Nope.
Then a few million dollars?
Still nope.
A few hundred thousand dollars?
Still nope.
Give up?
Mr. Nakamura was given a cash bonus of 20,000 yen and that’s it. That’s roughly GBP90/USD180/SGD300/RM650. Yes, profound unfairness isn’t it? See, the Land of the Rising Sun has this cherished tradition of respect for seniority. If you respect your grandfathers, that’s perfectly fine. But when you’re promoting people just because they’re older, that’s where the problems start. In fact, this problem was so serious that Japanese companies were stagnating in the past because their younger talents moved to the United States for better job prospects. Now you know why Japanese companies are giants in their own right but suffered from creativity and innovation problems. For those interested in Japan for SEP, I hope this wouldn’t deter you. Despite this problem, Japan still has a great culture and studying there would be an enriching experience. At least, justice still prevails there. In the end, Mr. Nakamura is awarded USD7 million by the courts (he originally won USD180 million in settlements but settled out of court for a smaller sum). He’s currently a professor at UC Santa Barbara now.
Well, I’ve given you as much context as I could. You can go on and read the article now and see what kind of Faustian bargains you’re in for. If you remain in science, it is almost certain that at some point in your career you will invent something–or be working on a team that invents something–that has potential commercial value. Let’s hope Mr. Fiske is right. 
Most importantly, read the ending paragraph.
You may be shocked to learn that something you invented in graduate school, as a postdoc, or while in a staff position at a university, national lab, or company doesn’t belong to you. You gave it away, probably without knowing it.
That should get all of you scrambling for the article. 
