<p>gqunit –</p>
<p>Ahhh, the Internet. At least a subject I know a little about since I’ve had teh priviledge of meeting and speaking with both Vinton Cerf and Leonard Kleinrock, plus I worked with a guy who once worked at BBN.</p>
<p>To illustrate how complex it can be for an institution to claim rights to an idea or invention, the internet owes its existence to at least three universities, the government, and a private engineering firm. You’ve got UCLA, Stanford, and MIT involved in the packet switching and the TCP/IP protocol. Kleinrock and Cerf at UCLA worked on the tip of the protocol. BBN in Boston (whose founders were MIT professors) set the guidelines under a contract from the government. The first recorded internet transmission was between a group of students at UCLA including Cerf, advised by Kleinrock (who had worked on queing theory at MIT and moved on to UCLA) at UCLA’s computer in the comp sci lab, to a computer in the comp sci lab at Stanford. So, who can claim credit? MIT? UCLA? Stanford? – the U. of Illinois for the work on the browser Mosaic? – or maybe Yale since Al Gore apparently invented the Internet :)</p>
<p>It makes no sense for any institution to claim rights to breakthroughs, enhancements, and commercialization of technology. The modern world of research is geographically collaberative between institutions, and temporally collaborative as researchers are hired from on institution to another.</p>
<p>I’m sure every breakthrough can share credit with at least 3-4 institutions, and 5-10 researchers, as the Internet example shows.</p>