8 ms·

Patent trolls have a surprising ally: universities

• eshvk 13y ago
  I find that the article is conflating the interests of the general public with those of a private company. A lot of money investment goes into research by a University. It is not clear to me why they shouldn't attempt to monetize it. At the extreme, yes, this may turn out to become patent trolling. Surely, there is a middle path where the university gets compensated for the amount of investment that goes in.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • eshvk 13y ago
      > You don't think all software that researchers/grad students write should be open source?? Erm...I am not going to make declarative statements one way or the other. I have worked on academic projects where the nature of the grant means that the work done goes to a private/defense source. Also, I think there is a distinction between software and research papers being open sourced and patents.
  • anaphor 13y ago
    Do you agree or disagree that all software/technology produced by publicly funded universities should be free (as in freedom)?
    • philwelch 13y ago
      Your comment reads like one of those ideological loaded questions that pop up on Upworthy when you try and follow a link there.
      • anaphor 13y ago
        Except it isn't a false dichotomy like many of those questions. Either you agree that it should be free software or you don't. Privately funded institutions can do whatever they want in my opinion, but I don't think public funds should be used to produce closed software. Do you agree? Edit: to clarify, I'm not saying everything they do should be released, but that whenever possible, any substantial technology should be designed so that it could be useful to other people or researchers and released with either some kind of free license or into the public domain.
    • CJefferson 13y ago
      Another (better in my opinion) way of phrasing this question is: Do you agree/disagree that the government should give more money to universities, so all research can be free (as in freedom). I agree with your principle, but tgere is no free lunch. This will lead to either higher taxes, or less publicly funded research.
      • eshvk 13y ago
        > Do you agree/disagree that the government should give more money to universities, so all research can be free (as in freedom). This phrasing I agree with (conditionally). I think as a taxpayer if more money can let research be free with patents acting more like a way of enforcing that downstream work done based on that patent is also not patentable. To give you guys some more context. I don't necessarily think that the interests of the public are the same as the interests of a corporation. E.g. if I do research on finding a new way of curing AIDS and Big Pharma 101 takes that research and changes one tiny molecule, patents the resulting product and sells it for exorbitant costs, I should have a way to either make them pay or force to not sell it for such a cost. Considering that it is leveraged on my research.
      • thomasahle 13y ago
        > I agree with your principle, but tgere is no free lunch. Ah, but of course it is assumed that such free research will make its way to businesses which profit and so pay more taxes.
      • ChuckMcM 13y ago
        Rather than higher taxes I would prefer simply to reallocate the budget. Rather than giving a billion dollars to the NSA to build a data center in Utah, give it to Universities to do research and publish it for free.
    • ams6110 13y ago
      The same thing happens in a lot of contracting arrangements. Federal government contracts software development work, and the developer generally retains intellectual property rights to whatever is developed (unlike most private software development contracting arrangements). To your question: I'm not sure. To the extent universities can generate revenue from developments that were publicly funded, they need less public funding in the future. Unfortunately I don't see that happen much; the revenue goes into funding a large administrative bureaucracy to manage licensing and technology transfer.
• baldfat 13y ago
  being a former College Librarian I totally agree with the statement. it was so frustrating to hear the aggression and fear of Open Source. when it came to copyright librarians are the biggest defenders. I never understood why. also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also.
  • eshvk 13y ago
    > also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also. Yes, but does that mean that all things that made from public funding should not be monetized? Is it a requirement that a road constructed out of taxpayer money should not have a toll?
    • AnthonyMouse 13y ago
      Road tolls are quite undesirable. Tolls require some toll collecting apparatus which wastes that portion of the collected funds and may have negative externalities (e.g. increased surveillance, increased air pollution or reduced road capacity due to slowing for toll booths). Moreover, it discourages productive use of the road. If a toll discourages use of a road at any point in time when the road is being used at less than its full capacity then you're "wasting" the road and creating secondary inefficiencies, e.g. fewer people in the office park on one side of the toll road will travel the road to visit a coffee house on the other side which causes the coffee house to lose business, and allows a different coffee house that happens to be in the opposite direction from the office park to raise prices and gouge the workers in the office park. You can see the obvious analogies with patents on publicly funded research. This is to be distinguished from congestion pricing which has nothing to do with paying for the road and should only apply at the times when the road would otherwise have insufficient capacity for the traffic volume, with the explicit intent of reducing usage. Note however that congestion pricing can be inefficient for many of the same reasons and is also undesirable unless the alternatives of expanding road capacity or improving mass transit to reduce traffic volume are both impractical.
      • Rizz 13y ago
        One reason for tolls (and patents from public research) is that they cause the people who use them to pay, instead of everyone. That seems reasonable to me in those instances where the road or invention isn't clearly for the public good of the whole public.
• anaphor 13y ago
  I'm not sure if this is surprising to people who are familiar with how universities often take the work of graduate students and make it closed and try to profit off of it. It is a huge problem that universities are forcing software in particular to be closed source just so they can profit off of their researchers/grad students.
  • eshvk 13y ago
    I was a grad. student for three years. I am not sure it is a "take the work of graduate students and make it closed" kind of deal. It is more like you are an employee of the University and your work belongs to your employer. Also, at least at UT, the grant system was designed to be protective of the rights of the Grad. student/researcher so that his/her work could be monetized later if need be.
    • thomasahle 13y ago
      Universities I've attended have had similar rules for undergraduates, even though those cam hardly be considered "employees" with the fees they pay for courses...
  • wsxcde 13y ago
    A few things: 1. The universities do have a legitimate right to the work of grad students. They provide the facilities and the environment for this work to happen. And this is not just paying the electric bills and some of the stipends. It includes teaching the right courses, inviting leading researchers to speak thereby enabling the creation of new knowledge, helping conduct research conferences and so forth. It's only fair that they earn some money off the work that the grad students and faculty do. 2. Universities have a strong incentive to monetize their intellectual property. This is why they will almost always licence the IP back to the inventors for reasonable terms if the inventors want to start a company with their work. Just owning IP isn't very useful to universities, they want to earn royalties. 3. It's the current climate of academic funding being extremely hard to find that is forcing universities to look for newer revenue streams. If you are frustrated with their behavior, at least a part of the blame goes to our anti-intellectual Zeitgeist which regards academic teaching and research with extreme mistrust.
• jedbrown 13y ago
  Let's take the intent of patents at face value, ignoring the perverse incentives and broken review process that may jeopardize their utility even in the private sector. Patents claim to benefit the public by providing incentive to (a) invest in research that may be easily "scooped" by competitors and (b) disseminate information about inventions so that others can benefit. I do not find either compelling in the case of universities. The vast majority of research at universities occurs regardless of possible royalties because it is externally-funded and researchers compete for grant funding and prestige. Publishing a significant result first garners citations and prestige (and likely helps fund future proposals), directly benefitting both the researcher and their institution. Similarly, researchers publish important innovations because publications are literally the currency of academia.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • amirmc 13y ago
    You're assuming too much about academia and the people in it. We're not all automatons driven by the need to write papers. Plenty of people (eg grad students) are willing to commercialise research work given the opportunity. Also, please don't assume that whatever can get published in a Nature paper is ready for mainstream use. It can take years of further R&D (that's not paper-worthy) to actually create something for the market. Dis-incentivising that process would be detrimental in the long term. Note: my comments relate to science-based patents, not software ones (I don't really understand those). Edit: If the problem is with the Patent system, that's where a solution must be found. Identify and deal with the actual problem, not the symptoms.
    • jedbrown 13y ago
      Grad students are primarily motivated to graduate so that they can be treated well and paid commensurate with their expertise. That is accomplished via the usual academic channels. Grad students that want to found companies are better off doing that. Yes, there is a huge gap between research papers and marketable products, but universities usually are not funding that conversion. Spinoff companies might, but universities want to get IP rights before the spinoff happens so that they can get royalties. Where is the risky investment in research that patents are supposed to be making possible?
• alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Look. The 'problem' with patent trolls is two fold: (1) The legal system permits them to shake down companies in ridiculous ways, and (2) The patent system grants obscene patents. The solution is to attack those two problems. Not to attack the concept of patents themselves nor NPEs. If the anti-patent-troll efforts were focused upon those two points specifically, meaningful reform would be much easier to achieve; fewer special interests would be aligned against the changes.
  • interstitial 13y ago
    You have my vote for next patent commissioner.
  • tolmasky 13y ago
    It's not realistic to expect patents to be granted more intelligently. We are by definition, in the hypothetical best case (all honest actors), talking about the absolute bleeding edge of technology, where you are going to need real experts to be able to discern what is "real innovation" and what isn't. I don't even consider myself capable of analyzing patents except for in an incredibly narrow slice of computer science where I've worked for 10 years, so I'm not sure where you expect to find these generalists who will one day be looking at AI algorithms and the next day be judging graphics code. The only alternative would be to literally have an expert from every subfield. Even if you had infinite funds to fill this magical patent office, why would such experts take this boring job (unless their goal is to work on physics on the side ;) )? As it stand today btw, most patent clerks being hired are engineers straight out of college, and I imagine they aren't exactly the top of their class. No one dreams of being a patent clerk. This is all exacerbated by the fact that the patent agency is a government agency, where there really isn't anything incentivizing them to get better. And yet on the other side you have lawyers who are 100% incentivized to create the most convoluted patents to actively confuse (the already ill-equipped) patent clerks and juries. I also agree with the statement "if we could just grant the right patents then this wouldn't be a problem". I just don't see any reasonable way to increase the fidelity of patent grants, nor a reasonable fallback system for when a bad patent DOES inevitably get granted (trial by jury for discerning innovation is probably the worst method). 1000 years ago you could be a mathematician, poet, and biologist. Today, you have to go to school for 5 years to get a PhD in an incredibly focused subfield. 100 years ago the patents you were dealing with were "machine that makes light". Now its methods of improving graphics performance when running on this super specific kind of computer architecture. It might have been reasonable for an outsider to make a judgement call before, but I seriously don't think it is anymore.
• Rizz 13y ago
  What exactly is the problem with patent trolls? Someone made an invention and wants to profit from it, and not every inventor is good at starting and running a business. Besides in quite a few business sectors the barriers of entry are too high to be able to monetize an invention from scratch. You see the exact same with lawyers, accountants, etc. Companies specialize in those specific tasks so they can be good at what they do, and other businesses hire them to simplify their own. As I see it the problems are that patents are granted on ridiculous things, every new type of digital device comes with a slew of patents that basically replicate everything that can be done with a computer, and in biology patents are granted on DNA simply for finding it in a creature, not for actually designing it. That is one thing that should be solved, the other thing that should be fixed are the damages awarded by courts. For a phone or software product with 10000 features any single one shouldn't be worth much more than a ten thousandth of the price.
  • emiliobumachar 13y ago
    Your second paragraph seems to answer the question posed in the first one. If patent trolls actually produced nonobvious inventions and infringers were mostly copiers instead of independent inventors, then patent trolls would not be much of a problem.
• TallGuyShort 13y ago
  Entirely anecdotal, but I once had a professor invite a person from our University's patent office to come and explain some things about intellectual property to us. I was disgusted by how he bragged about the number of law suits the university had prosecuted, rather than the number of successful innovations that had been brought to the industry. I think it's great for university's to drive innovation and adoption, but I must question the motives of some of the individuals.
  • chrismcb 13y ago
    What is there to question? Either their motive is to make money, or it is to do as much research as possible. But it takes money to do research. One way to get money is to patent and license what you have so you can continue to innovate (which is the main reason why we have patents in the first place)
    • georgemcbay 13y ago
      Actually the real "main reason" we have patents (in the US) is to avoid people not sharing trade secrets, which was a real problem with industry in the 1700s but is not one now. The justification for them being a way to ensure the "inventor" is compensated came much later and Thomas Jefferson would likely be spinning in his grave if he knew how they were used now.
• throwawaykf 13y ago
  Here I go citing another Lemley paper. I'm afraid I may end up giving the impression that I agree wih him on things! "Are Universities Patent Trolls?", Mark Lemley, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776