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A major part of the research — e.g.the entire audio part of the MPEG standards — was done at research institutes such as the Fraunhofer institutes, which financ

A major part of the research — e.g.the entire audio part of the MPEG standards — was done at research institutes such as the Fraunhofer institutes, which finance themselves from patent licenses. So your comment is also missing a major part ofthe picture.

ohazi 9y ago
The professors and their friends on the committee are self-dealing when allocating the committee's research funds. Grad students at the Fraunhofer partner universities still do the bulk of the work. I don't see how I've missed anything.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Fraunhofer can't pay its researchers anymore if their patent income goes away? Research then is only done with government funds or in corporations, where the corporations definitely won't license their research (e.g. selfdriving tech) to competitors. In places where the research is done like you said, all your points are true, but IMO institutions such as the Fraunhofer institutes are worth keeping.
  - ohazi 9y ago
    I agree that they're worth keeping, but patent income isn't the only way to fund this research. It's just been one of the easier ways to fund it up to now. Also note that I never claimed that the patent income wasn't being put to good use by funding research. I was arguing that many of the patents themselves were bullshit, and that many of the companies that own them had acquired them from universities on slightly-too-friendly terms because of the MPEG cartel.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      There isn't really another way to fund Fraunhofer institutes — they're supposed to turn theoretical research into something that can be directly applied ny corporations, so they have to have an incentive to create something like that. With funding through patent fees, exactly this happens. The alternatives are government funded research, or companies like Google doing it all internally, but then Google will keep some of it as trade secrets, which is also undesirable. I don't think there's an alternative if your goal is go keep all research publicly available and in a way that any company can easily license it.
      - ohazi 9y ago
        But for this model to work, the international community of licensees has to actually believe that your patents have merit. If you act like a cartel, generate reams of questionably valid patents so that you can hand them out to your member corporations under sweetheart terms and at the expense of your licensees, you're eventually going to piss off enough people to make the music stop. Evidently, this is what happened. The patent pool is now so large that it's really easy for other players to come in with their own, similar patents. They can use these to create new patent pools and try to take everybody hostage with higher fees (HEVC Advance), or they can build a protective moat and threaten to sue anyone who demands licensing fees from them. Patent licensing can be made to work in a lot of cases, but these guys really dug their own graves here. Also, I think there are a number of alternative funding routes that can be made to work. Government funding, as you mentioned, could be one of them. Terms of the funding could stipulate that the research be made publicly available and licensable under reasonable terms. Companies can also choose to fund the research via Fraunhofer rather than doing it all internally. Not everybody has Google's resources, and there are major advantages to having improvements included in a standard that everybody can access.
      - dahauns 9y ago
        As I've stated above: Fraunhofer is predominantly government funded.
dahauns 9y ago
>which finance themselves from patent licenses. Patent licenses are only a tiny fraction of their finances. https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Jahresbericht/jb2016/Fraunhofer-Jahresbericht-2016.pdf https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Ja... 2016 they made 134 million € from patent licenses, about 6% from their total income of 2.1 billion €. Of which about two thirds come from either public grants or direct government funding.
- kuschku 9y ago
  I'll recommend reading the other pages on Fraunhofer's site explaining their goals and why they were created, and how they differ from the other German research societies . But of course, government funding is today one of the largest sources still.
  - dahauns 9y ago
    I don't need to, I'm fully aware of the differences between Fraunhofer and the others (basically PPP, applied sciences etc.). I simply posit that (software) patents actually aren't needed for that. Or to be more specific: economic exploitation of their patents - nowadays, I could e.g. imagine them to offer their considerable patent pools for defensive purposes, to "disarm" patent minefields in problematic fields. Of course, that would be a tightrope walk in regards to cooperation with private entities...
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Well, then you missed an important part. The use of patents by Fraunhofer is to ensure that the research is actually real-world usable (and the government isn't just wasting their grants) and that it is worth it to the industry, while at the same time ensuring that the industry helps in funding the research that it will make profit fron
      - dahauns 9y ago
        Sorry, read my edit. IMO it's an incredibly reductionist view that it's only worth something to the industry if someone can make (most of?) money via patents from it. And another edit: One could argue that's a side effect from the modern anglo-american tradition of patenting (that has seemingly spilled over to continental europe) that almost completele ignores "Erfindungshöhe", stripping patents of their inherent technical merit leaving exploitability as the only measurement.
tincholio 9y ago
MP3 was based off Karlheinz Brandenburg's PhD work and subsequent work at Bell Labs, all of which was not done at Fraunhofer.

ohazi 9y ago

The professors and their friends on the committee are self-dealing when allocating the committee's research funds. Grad students at the Fraunhofer partner universities still do the bulk of the work. I don't see how I've missed anything.

kuschku 9y ago
Fraunhofer can't pay its researchers anymore if their patent income goes away? Research then is only done with government funds or in corporations, where the corporations definitely won't license their research (e.g. selfdriving tech) to competitors. In places where the research is done like you said, all your points are true, but IMO institutions such as the Fraunhofer institutes are worth keeping.
- ohazi 9y ago
  I agree that they're worth keeping, but patent income isn't the only way to fund this research. It's just been one of the easier ways to fund it up to now. Also note that I never claimed that the patent income wasn't being put to good use by funding research. I was arguing that many of the patents themselves were bullshit, and that many of the companies that own them had acquired them from universities on slightly-too-friendly terms because of the MPEG cartel.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    There isn't really another way to fund Fraunhofer institutes — they're supposed to turn theoretical research into something that can be directly applied ny corporations, so they have to have an incentive to create something like that. With funding through patent fees, exactly this happens. The alternatives are government funded research, or companies like Google doing it all internally, but then Google will keep some of it as trade secrets, which is also undesirable. I don't think there's an alternative if your goal is go keep all research publicly available and in a way that any company can easily license it.
    - ohazi 9y ago
      But for this model to work, the international community of licensees has to actually believe that your patents have merit. If you act like a cartel, generate reams of questionably valid patents so that you can hand them out to your member corporations under sweetheart terms and at the expense of your licensees, you're eventually going to piss off enough people to make the music stop. Evidently, this is what happened. The patent pool is now so large that it's really easy for other players to come in with their own, similar patents. They can use these to create new patent pools and try to take everybody hostage with higher fees (HEVC Advance), or they can build a protective moat and threaten to sue anyone who demands licensing fees from them. Patent licensing can be made to work in a lot of cases, but these guys really dug their own graves here. Also, I think there are a number of alternative funding routes that can be made to work. Government funding, as you mentioned, could be one of them. Terms of the funding could stipulate that the research be made publicly available and licensable under reasonable terms. Companies can also choose to fund the research via Fraunhofer rather than doing it all internally. Not everybody has Google's resources, and there are major advantages to having improvements included in a standard that everybody can access.
    - dahauns 9y ago
      As I've stated above: Fraunhofer is predominantly government funded.

dahauns 9y ago

>which finance themselves from patent licenses. Patent licenses are only a tiny fraction of their finances. https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Jahresbericht/jb2016/Fraunhofer-Jahresbericht-2016.pdf https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/publikationen/Ja... 2016 they made 134 million € from patent licenses, about 6% from their total income of 2.1 billion €. Of which about two thirds come from either public grants or direct government funding.

kuschku 9y ago
I'll recommend reading the other pages on Fraunhofer's site explaining their goals and why they were created, and how they differ from the other German research societies . But of course, government funding is today one of the largest sources still.
- dahauns 9y ago
  I don't need to, I'm fully aware of the differences between Fraunhofer and the others (basically PPP, applied sciences etc.). I simply posit that (software) patents actually aren't needed for that. Or to be more specific: economic exploitation of their patents - nowadays, I could e.g. imagine them to offer their considerable patent pools for defensive purposes, to "disarm" patent minefields in problematic fields. Of course, that would be a tightrope walk in regards to cooperation with private entities...
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Well, then you missed an important part. The use of patents by Fraunhofer is to ensure that the research is actually real-world usable (and the government isn't just wasting their grants) and that it is worth it to the industry, while at the same time ensuring that the industry helps in funding the research that it will make profit fron
    - dahauns 9y ago
      Sorry, read my edit. IMO it's an incredibly reductionist view that it's only worth something to the industry if someone can make (most of?) money via patents from it. And another edit: One could argue that's a side effect from the modern anglo-american tradition of patenting (that has seemingly spilled over to continental europe) that almost completele ignores "Erfindungshöhe", stripping patents of their inherent technical merit leaving exploitability as the only measurement.

tincholio 9y ago

MP3 was based off Karlheinz Brandenburg's PhD work and subsequent work at Bell Labs, all of which was not done at Fraunhofer.