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Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

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Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#31

Post by totalrobe »

hurin wrote: post #24
chrisBob wrote: post #5

Universities are an interesting case in patent reform. By many people's definitions they would be the patent trolls that we are trying to get rid of: They are not the inventors, and they don't make anything. As an engineering student at one of the schools on the list I like that my school is willing to pay to file a patent with my name on it even if any revenue would mostly go back to the school.

>They are not the inventors, and they don't make anything. This is highly misleading if not down-right ignorant. Academic research is and has been absolutely necessary for most of the technologies we use today - patent's might not be the best way of financing said research, but we should be clear on the first part; before we roll the barrel on bad administrations and wasteful spending at universities. The toxic respo…

Agreed, and it sound like the type of comment made by a clever university student that hasn't experienced the typical soul crushing workplace.

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#32

Post by nickysielicki »

No surprise there, universities are patent trolls and they stand to lose from it. Fuck them. I'm a student at UW-Madison. WARF stands for Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and they're responsible for whoring out patents held by the school.

WARF was ranked the 5th worst patent troll by business insider in 2012. [1]

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-patent-holding-compan...

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#33

Post by abalone »

lettergram wrote: post #4

I'd like to say... I just attended a talk where one of the professors is using NSF funding to conduct research, then patent all of their work. Companies are then forced to pay the university based research group for use of their products and for further development. Personally, I cannot decide whether or not this is for the best or not. The research group can bring in more money to produce quality work. On the other…

The elephant in the room is that taxpayers are subsidizing private tech industry that gets to keep all the profits from commercializations of public research, save for the pittance they sometimes pay for tech transfer licenses.

There is a bit a selective outrage going on here. How dare those universities try to profit from taxpayer research! The nerve!

Meanwhile tech companies make billions of profits on these inventions without paying a dime back to the government, apart from the taxes that all companies pay.

At least the pittance that some pay back to universities via tech transfer helps support further public research. The government grants don't always cover the full cost of labs and professorships.

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#34

Post by ihnorton »

williamstein wrote: post #12
lettergram wrote: post #4

I'd like to say... I just attended a talk where one of the professors is using NSF funding to conduct research, then patent all of their work. Companies are then forced to pay the university based research group for use of their products and for further development. Personally, I cannot decide whether or not this is for the best or not. The research group can bring in more money to produce quality work. On the other…

I'm a University professor who does much work funded by the NSF (millions of dollars), whose university (Univ of Washington) is on that list. My tech transfer office tried hard to make me keep some of my software work closed source and succeeded for years (see http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-is-sagemathcloud-l... ). In December I realized to my surprise that some of my NSF grants that funded my work had an…

The NIH has similar requirements in some RFAs, and has funded the creation and maintenance of a number of open-source, widely-used libraries such as ImageJ, the Visualization Toolkit, and the Insight Toolkit (either directly or indirectly via support for clinically-focused applications utilizing those).

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#35

Post by tankenmate »

wickedlogic wrote: post #27
jordigh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, I don't understand. Are the non-free parts of SMC there because the university demands that they stay non-free or because you want them to? Does this particular grant involve any of the non-free code you've already written? Also, the grant speaks about releasing software. Do they consider it a "release" if you only give web access to the frontend, but keep all of the backend private?

Sadly, the open sourcing of software does not address the patent aspect. It makes subversion easy... perhaps common place, but is probably not really enough.

Unless of course if you put in your grant application that the code will be licensed under GPLv3 or any other license that requires submittors to provide a license for patents.

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#36

Post by tmarthal »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #29

It is worth to note here, that the universities don't speak against patent reform as such, but against special parts of the current reform. I am not familiar with the current reform, but problem is the fixation of so called "patent trolls". Many legitimate patent holders can be easily hurt by a reform that just is pleasing for the big corporations. When (for example) patent trolls are identified by the notion "don't…

Right. The one thing that (tangentially related) is the quote "The prospect of substantially increased financial risk would discourage universities and other patent holders lacking extensive litigation resources from legitimately defending their patents".

Do universities really see themselves as the ones "lacking extensive litigation resources"? I think they don't understand the nature of 'small inventors'.

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#37

Post by will_brown »

Apocryphon wrote: post #14
pskittle wrote: post #9

Anyone know why Harvard and Stanford not on the list?

Maybe their endowments are big enough for them to not care about having to resort to patents to pay their faculty?

I would have thought you are correct. Harvard is sitting on $32B and Stanford $18.7B in tax-free endowments, the largest and 3rd largest endowments respectively.

However, Yale is on the list and they have $20.7B (2nd largest). It does seem disingenuous for Yale to claim "[t]he prospect of substantially increased financial risk would discourage universities and other patent holders lacking extensive litigation resources from legitimately defending their patents." Not a whole lot of businesses are sitting on +$20B in cash period, much less +$20B tax free.

As a side the top 10 school endowments in 2013 = ~$141B.[1]

[1] http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list...

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#38

Post by Quanticles »

Many successful companies started as university startups working with federal funds. If the university was not able to patent, then the startups could never happen. Since startups are credited with being the innovation driver in the commercial world, killing off all of these startups would have a stifling effect on innovation in the US.

A similar situation is with the small business innovative research program (SBIR). The main purpose of this program is to provide federal funds to perform research in order to help new small businesses grow, which in turn become large companies or get acquired by large companies. If all federal research dollars ended up resulting in no patents for the companies performing the research, then these startups wouldn't exist, and the purpose of the program would be destroyed.

Everyone agrees that public dollars should result in public benefit. However, there is more public benefit to be had by creating lots of startups than there is by creating a bunch of non-patent publications.

The US thrives due to it's technological advancement, which is driven by startups. Let's be careful to not destroy that benefit.

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#39

Post by rayiner »

lettergram wrote: post #4

I'd like to say... I just attended a talk where one of the professors is using NSF funding to conduct research, then patent all of their work. Companies are then forced to pay the university based research group for use of their products and for further development. Personally, I cannot decide whether or not this is for the best or not. The research group can bring in more money to produce quality work. On the other…

Consider Kickstarter. Just because the public pays for the development of the product, does that mean the product should be free (or at least, sold at the cost of materials)?

I call this the "MIT model" of R&D. MIT, moreso than Stanford, is famous for participating in the military-industrial-educational complex. It's anything but ideologically pure, but it's also been amazingly successful at developing "hard" technology.

Re: Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation

#40

Post by droopyEyelids »

Quanticles wrote: post #38

Many successful companies started as university startups working with federal funds. If the university was not able to patent, then the startups could never happen. Since startups are credited with being the innovation driver in the commercial world, killing off all of these startups would have a stifling effect on innovation in the US. A similar situation is with the small business innovative research program (SBIR)…

There is a big leap between 'not being able to patent' and 'startup could never happen' that you need to explain.

Many, many people create businesses out of open source technologies.

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