3 ms·

How would universities get paid for the research they facilitate if this were the standard practice? My university would have to close or curtail its activities

How would universities get paid for the research they facilitate if this were the standard practice? My university would have to close or curtail its activities in nearly unimaginable ways without the billions of dollars that the research foundation has generated honestly (via things brought into existence by UW researchers: without their minds, their work/results/products would not exist). Incidentally, my university also sued Intel recently over a patent dispute and won.

RexRollman 15y ago
I don't have a problem with a university owning a patent unless the work was somehow funded by the Federal Government, in which case it should be disallowed.
- nobody314159 15y ago
  What about the university using research funds to defend the patent? If you have a patent you have to defend it and prosecute to make money from it. That costs lawyers. At one point do you decide it would be cheaper to just allow the world to benefit from the invention rather than spend your entire budget on a legal case? Are we going to have universities forming patent groups to fight other universities?
_delirium 15y ago
The amount of money generated for universities by patents on CS/engineering research is quite small, though. The total for all fields in 2009 (according to an unfortunately paywalled report: http://chronicle.com/article/Table-Licensing-Revenue-and/125729/ http://chronicle.com/article/Table-Licensing-Revenue-and/125...) was $1.8 billion, of which the vast majority went to a handful of schools for blockbuster biotech patents (e.g., NYU has been pulling in $100m+ annually from the Remicade patents). I would be surprised if UW non-bio patents are bringing in more than low-single-digit millions, i.e. not much compared to what they get in corporate donations, not to mention NSF and DARPA grants, and even the state subsidy and tuition. The former Dean of Georgia Tech's CS dept quotes John Hurt from the NSF as claiming: "Of 3,200 universities, perhaps six have made significant amounts of money from their intellectual property rights." I don't think there have been any blockbuster university (non-bio) tech patents since the Akamai (MIT) / PageRank (Stanford) pair ten years ago.
- cube13 15y ago
  This is really more of an issue with how universities value the research, I think. Most of the time, there isn't a very clear immediate business benefit, so they're willing to part with the IP for very little money. Prime case is the Mosaic browser IP and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All the research was done by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for the university, and when it was completed and released, didn't really bother to try to get anything from it. The university basically sold the rights to an offshoot company for a very small fee-I believe it was under $1 million, and didn't see any money from it after that.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Part of that is a deliberate strategy on the part of some universities, based on a guess that they'll get more in donations from corporations, spinoffs, and successful alumni voluntarily, than they would get by being tight-fisted with IP. Plus, it increases the university's prestige to have their stuff involved in more products, and their alumni involved in more successful ventures, so there's a cost to doing anything that would complicate stuff up-front. The goal is to get it on the back-end instead: don't hassle the not-yet-successful startup, but if they IPO, nag to see if they're willing to kick in a $50m building or write you into their will. I'm not sure which version of the calculus is right, but it's at least plausible to me that universities stand to lose more in donations/prestige than they'd gain in royalties if they took stricter approaches to patent licensing.

RexRollman 15y ago

I don't have a problem with a university owning a patent unless the work was somehow funded by the Federal Government, in which case it should be disallowed.

nobody314159 15y ago
What about the university using research funds to defend the patent? If you have a patent you have to defend it and prosecute to make money from it. That costs lawyers. At one point do you decide it would be cheaper to just allow the world to benefit from the invention rather than spend your entire budget on a legal case? Are we going to have universities forming patent groups to fight other universities?

_delirium 15y ago

The amount of money generated for universities by patents on CS/engineering research is quite small, though. The total for all fields in 2009 (according to an unfortunately paywalled report: http://chronicle.com/article/Table-Licensing-Revenue-and/125729/ http://chronicle.com/article/Table-Licensing-Revenue-and/125...) was $1.8 billion, of which the vast majority went to a handful of schools for blockbuster biotech patents (e.g., NYU has been pulling in $100m+ annually from the Remicade patents). I would be surprised if UW non-bio patents are bringing in more than low-single-digit millions, i.e. not much compared to what they get in corporate donations, not to mention NSF and DARPA grants, and even the state subsidy and tuition. The former Dean of Georgia Tech's CS dept quotes John Hurt from the NSF as claiming: "Of 3,200 universities, perhaps six have made significant amounts of money from their intellectual property rights." I don't think there have been any blockbuster university (non-bio) tech patents since the Akamai (MIT) / PageRank (Stanford) pair ten years ago.

cube13 15y ago
This is really more of an issue with how universities value the research, I think. Most of the time, there isn't a very clear immediate business benefit, so they're willing to part with the IP for very little money. Prime case is the Mosaic browser IP and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All the research was done by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for the university, and when it was completed and released, didn't really bother to try to get anything from it. The university basically sold the rights to an offshoot company for a very small fee-I believe it was under $1 million, and didn't see any money from it after that.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Part of that is a deliberate strategy on the part of some universities, based on a guess that they'll get more in donations from corporations, spinoffs, and successful alumni voluntarily, than they would get by being tight-fisted with IP. Plus, it increases the university's prestige to have their stuff involved in more products, and their alumni involved in more successful ventures, so there's a cost to doing anything that would complicate stuff up-front. The goal is to get it on the back-end instead: don't hassle the not-yet-successful startup, but if they IPO, nag to see if they're willing to kick in a $50m building or write you into their will. I'm not sure which version of the calculus is right, but it's at least plausible to me that universities stand to lose more in donations/prestige than they'd gain in royalties if they took stricter approaches to patent licensing.