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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

#11

Post by wahsd »

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…

There is so much of that kind of thing going on. It's even worse when public money paid for "research" that resulted in a product that is then sold back to the government and then additional contracts are issued to improve, change, customize, or alter the product. All of which is funded at wildly overpriced rates without any controls or solid guidelines.

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

#12

Post by williamstein »

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 explicit open source requirement. This was entirely because of a new requirement in a specific NSF program -- search open source at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14520/nsf14520.htm to see it. This was something that a program officer (Dan Katz) at NSF added a few years ago; I asked him about it a few weeks ago when he visited UW, and he said it was inspired by when he worked as a researcher at Caltech and he wanted to open source his work and used grant requirements to do so.

Granting agencies like NSF can have a massive impact on ensuring the work they fund with tax payer money is made available to tax payers for free. The NSF SI2 program is a rare new example of exactly this happening in practice today. I couldn't find any other similar NSF requirements for other NSF programs, but I am going to hold this up as an example whenever I have a chance to advise NSF in the future. Little by little things may change.

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

#13

Post by 001sky »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #8
rdl wrote: post #3

Wow. Universities trying to protect their franchise as businesses (even if they're non-profit, they pay salaries to the people making this pronouncement...), rather than advancing their core mission. Seems a lot like the publishers of journals. Yay! (Perhaps they can die in the same fire.)

Shocked! I'm just shocked! Gambling at Rick's! (Since universities have an overwhelming interest in making tons of money, this is a typical non-story-story "dog bites man". The only thing of interest is the contortions the players will go through to keep the cronyism humming along. The joke above references the movie Casablanca. Everybody knew that there was a lot of money changing hands but the official position had…

Presumed credibility is the pretext for all con-artist scams.

So hypocrisy is always a story...

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

#16

Post by jordigh »

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…

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?

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

#18

Post by Alex3917 »

rdl wrote: post #3

Wow. Universities trying to protect their franchise as businesses (even if they're non-profit, they pay salaries to the people making this pronouncement...), rather than advancing their core mission. Seems a lot like the publishers of journals. Yay! (Perhaps they can die in the same fire.)

> Universities trying to protect their franchise as businesses rather than advancing their core mission.

While I'm generally skeptical of Bayh-Dole, in part because it incentivizes universities to fake their research results, I also think their actual points may be valid. E.g. because the private sector has more money than them to spend on lawyers, this would leave them unable to enforce their I.P. rights, which would cause their patents to become basically worthless.

Even if you could make a good case for eliminating the patent system, which I think would be difficult, undoubtedly it's much more difficult to make a good argument for why only the super rich should be allowed to own intellectual property.

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

#19

Post by rhino369 »

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…

So the NSF should attach strings to the funding.
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