It's even worse than that. The main driving force behind VVC is AFAIK the Heinrich Hertz Institute, which used to be independent and has now been sucked into th

It's even worse than that. The main driving force behind VVC is AFAIK the Heinrich Hertz Institute, which used to be independent and has now been sucked into the Fraunhofer mothership, which is one of the big research organisations in Germany. Fraunhofer has a budget of over 2 billion Euros, and 30% of their money comes from public funding. They run over 70 institutes, so they do much more than this. The root problem here is that nowadays public research is funded with industry money, which means there has to be a return on investment, hence the patents. In fact, this has metastasized into universities being graded by their patent portfolio volume. So I would expect there to be patents even if 100% of the funding came from the tax payer. It would have been possible to do the whole process just with public money and zero patents. In fact, I would love it if some research team collated all the patent tax payments across the population of Germany and compare the bottom line cost for the country. I wager it would have been cheaper without patents, too.