Patent is what keeps research institutions running. The only reason MIT gets so much every year is because they make great research and companies are willing to

Patent is what keeps research institutions running. The only reason MIT gets so much every year is because they make great research and companies are willing to do joint research with professors. And for smaller, less competitive research institutions, patents help finance department. Grants are great but on top of grants departments can do better with revenue coming from patents. You'd be surprised how many a department can make on top of grants by just having patents. The IP director at my institution came to my class and talked to us. One postdoc made an impressive method on some neuroscience stuff and his invention would have been worth hundreds of millions to him and to the department. He was only able to get US patent not international patent only because he published his work to a journal. Patent has good and bad. We need to balance the two. And believe it or not, when you face a lot of competitors, if your invention can drive them out, you'd want to patent that. This is just how business works. If patent is bad because everything should be open, then military inventions should be open too. It might sound extreme, but patent is the weapon businessman uses.