8 ms·

When is the taxpayer going to be given the right to use inventions funded with their own money? It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money t

by sparkie 13y ago

When is the taxpayer going to be given the right to use inventions funded with their own money? It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'. Actually, the most stupid part about the whole thing it is that the government gets some rights to use these publicly-funded patented inventions. (As if the government, not the taxpayer funded it)

tostitos1979 13y ago
It is not as simple/obvious as you may think it is. It depends on what the goals of the govt are. If the govt is trying to encourage progress on cancer drugs, they can certainly give grants to stimulate that research direction. If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money. The govt can of course fund a new lab that does cancer research. It can choose to make all IP that comes out of this lab public. I think in the former case, there is a bigger multiplier effect/leverage from the same amount of money (without the IP restriction). You need to realize that IP is an artificial monopoly granted by the govt for a purpose.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  I don't think that the OP doesn't understand what "intellectual property" is, they just disagree with the assessment that it's necessary (or maybe proper) for the government to grant private monopolies on scientific knowledge. You need to realize that people can know what IP is and still disagree with you.
  - tostitos1979 13y ago
    Frankly, I am against patents but I understand why they are there :)
  - throwawaykf03 13y ago
    Maybe the OP understands what "IP" is, but it seems they do not understand the economics of research or why IP is still applicable to publicly funded research. If one knows the concept of IP but not why it's needed in these situations, one is still arguing from a position of incomplete understanding.
    - sparkie 13y ago
      I understand IP very well, and I disagree with the whole concept. Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  "If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money." And why is that a bad thing? If they have an idea that they think they can make a lot of money by patenting, they're going to do that research anyway with non-government funding (e.g., start a company and raise venture capital). So why waste taxpayer money funding it? Better for the government to fund something like basic scientific research that's not patentable (and on which applied research depends).
  - tostitos1979 13y ago
    The viewpoint "if the govt pays for it, it should be free" ... doesn't sound right to me. Let me offer why. This is equivalent to saying, if you raise VC funding, the VCs should get all the wealth you create since they put up the money.
    - sparkie 13y ago
      A VC can choose who they fund and under what terms - most importantly, they can choose not to fund something. The same isn't true for taxpayer funded research - it's money that government has forcibly taken from people to fund some arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever.
      - HarryHirsch 13y ago
        I was with you until you said "arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever". The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.
        sparkie 13y ago
        The taxpayer had no say in whether he wanted his money stolen so that some other guys can decide who can waste much of it. I was making it clear that this is nothing like a VC model, which is voluntary. If we were to make the comparison, it would be that people could chose themselves what research, if any, to fund. The issue with panels allocating taxpayer money, is that their interest is still in government. That is, they will fund research in which government has an interest or is neutral, and consequently, any research which is potentially harmful to government is scrapped (even if it would be beneficial to the taxpayer.) One might not think there's a distinction between what benefits the government and what benefits the taxpayer if one believes in the fairy tale that governments exist to benefit the people.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money" I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them. What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.
HarryHirsch 13y ago
The keyword you are looking for is Bayh-Dole. The short explanation goes like this: before Bayh-Dole patent rights were indeed with the federal government, but the Government did a rather poor job of turning the accumulated IP into money. Bayh-Dole was passed in the late Seventies, during the Carter-Reagan recession, and the idea was that the patents should now lie with researchers and universities because they would have a better idea how to exploit them, and it was unsaid that with this alternative funding channel open federal research expenditures could be reduced. The long version is that it is really complicated. A whole new ecosystem has grown up around this environment, and the patent system as is is very suitable for actual commercial processes but not at all for basic methods used in processes. Also: Stanford v. Roche
- nostromo 13y ago
  I doubt sparkie wants the federal government to hoard the patents it pays for. I'm guessing he or she would like to see findings not patented at all.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    You've seen how well our patent system works. If the findings were not patented by somebody, Big Corp. would just download the whitepaper, print it, submit it to the patent office and get the patent.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      An un-patent then, ie anybody can use this thing that taxes paid to develop.
      - 1457389 13y ago
        So let's say I discover a potentially groundbreaking new pathway that can be exploited by a new drug candidate to attack a major disease. Now who is going to go put in $350 million to get that drug candidate through PhI/II/III and beyond, with little guarantee of success, if they have no IP protection to stand on? Why would any rational investor fund such an endeavor when anyone else can step in once all the hard work (averaging $5 billion per successful drug) is done and reap the rewards?
tbagman 13y ago
It's a complex situation, as other posters have noted. Here's another complication. Often, faculty need multiple sources of funding over the years to support their research, including federal grants, university support (direct through money or indirect through facilities and staff), and industrial support through gifts and grants. As well, the intellectual heavy-lifting is done by the faculty and their students. If you believe in intellectual property rights, then who of all of these stakeholders deserves ownership of those rights? Personally, I lean against faculty patenting their inventions. I'd rather the IP is open to the public. Even if a faculty member wants to commercialize their research, I think they are better off competing in the marketplace rather than through IP arsenals. But, I understand the other point of view. Patent licensing is a lucrative source of revenue for universities (e.g., UFL and its Gatorade revenue) and inventors. As well, it's at least uncomfortable and perhaps unfair if opportunistic companies were able to commercialize on a faculty member's invention without renumeration or attribution. Complicated topic.
dominotw 13y ago
>It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'. Wouldn't that mean that researchers would be less motivated ?
- hrkristian 13y ago
  No, it means motivation would come from elsewhere, we're -as a society- just sinking further and further into a mindset where money is the one and only way for anything to get done. Sickening. The hammer was invented in spite of the fact it was impossible to control the proliferation of its design.
- sparkie 13y ago
  I doubt it. Many researchers aren't businessmen, the simply want to scratch an itch, and not want to work tedious day jobs. If they can make a living while doing something they enjoy, all is great. Except that very rarely does wanting to scratch an itch coincide with obtaining funds to do so. As a result, the researcher needs to make concessions to his own research goals, or the quality of it, in order to convince people who don't understand it that it has some value, in order to finance it. If not, they're gonna be stuck researching something they have little or no interest in, or back to the day job. This is the real motivation killer.
cowsandmilk 13y ago
I agree with some of your sentiment, but you shouldn't blame the academics. There are many academics who are no longer allowed to use things they invented them because the patent goes to the university. As a well-known example, John Pople wrote a program called Gaussian while at Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon licensed the program to Gaussian Inc. When John Pople moved to Northwestern, he was banned from using the program he wrote, as was all of Northwestern University. Before the passage of Bayh-Dole, Gaussian was given out for free by Carnegie Mellon. Once Bayh-Dole gave them clear rights in the code, everything changed.
pmorici 13y ago
You think that is bad? There is a whole class of small company that all they do is apply for government development grants and contracts which amount to funding to develop IP which otherwise wouldn't exist. The company then gets to keep all the IP they developed on the governments dime and if they made anything worthwhile sell it to the government at exorbitant prices.

by sparkie 13y ago

tostitos1979 13y ago

It is not as simple/obvious as you may think it is. It depends on what the goals of the govt are. If the govt is trying to encourage progress on cancer drugs, they can certainly give grants to stimulate that research direction. If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money. The govt can of course fund a new lab that does cancer research. It can choose to make all IP that comes out of this lab public. I think in the former case, there is a bigger multiplier effect/leverage from the same amount of money (without the IP restriction). You need to realize that IP is an artificial monopoly granted by the govt for a purpose.

hdevalence 13y ago
I don't think that the OP doesn't understand what "intellectual property" is, they just disagree with the assessment that it's necessary (or maybe proper) for the government to grant private monopolies on scientific knowledge. You need to realize that people can know what IP is and still disagree with you.
- tostitos1979 13y ago
  Frankly, I am against patents but I understand why they are there :)
- throwawaykf03 13y ago
  Maybe the OP understands what "IP" is, but it seems they do not understand the economics of research or why IP is still applicable to publicly funded research. If one knows the concept of IP but not why it's needed in these situations, one is still arguing from a position of incomplete understanding.
  - sparkie 13y ago
    I understand IP very well, and I disagree with the whole concept. Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.
greenyoda 13y ago
"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money." And why is that a bad thing? If they have an idea that they think they can make a lot of money by patenting, they're going to do that research anyway with non-government funding (e.g., start a company and raise venture capital). So why waste taxpayer money funding it? Better for the government to fund something like basic scientific research that's not patentable (and on which applied research depends).
- tostitos1979 13y ago
  The viewpoint "if the govt pays for it, it should be free" ... doesn't sound right to me. Let me offer why. This is equivalent to saying, if you raise VC funding, the VCs should get all the wealth you create since they put up the money.
  - sparkie 13y ago
    A VC can choose who they fund and under what terms - most importantly, they can choose not to fund something. The same isn't true for taxpayer funded research - it's money that government has forcibly taken from people to fund some arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever.
    - HarryHirsch 13y ago
      I was with you until you said "arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever". The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.
      - sparkie 13y ago
        The taxpayer had no say in whether he wanted his money stolen so that some other guys can decide who can waste much of it. I was making it clear that this is nothing like a VC model, which is voluntary. If we were to make the comparison, it would be that people could chose themselves what research, if any, to fund. The issue with panels allocating taxpayer money, is that their interest is still in government. That is, they will fund research in which government has an interest or is neutral, and consequently, any research which is potentially harmful to government is scrapped (even if it would be beneficial to the taxpayer.) One might not think there's a distinction between what benefits the government and what benefits the taxpayer if one believes in the fairy tale that governments exist to benefit the people.
betterunix 13y ago
"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money" I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them. What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.

HarryHirsch 13y ago

The keyword you are looking for is Bayh-Dole. The short explanation goes like this: before Bayh-Dole patent rights were indeed with the federal government, but the Government did a rather poor job of turning the accumulated IP into money. Bayh-Dole was passed in the late Seventies, during the Carter-Reagan recession, and the idea was that the patents should now lie with researchers and universities because they would have a better idea how to exploit them, and it was unsaid that with this alternative funding channel open federal research expenditures could be reduced. The long version is that it is really complicated. A whole new ecosystem has grown up around this environment, and the patent system as is is very suitable for actual commercial processes but not at all for basic methods used in processes. Also: Stanford v. Roche

nostromo 13y ago
I doubt sparkie wants the federal government to hoard the patents it pays for. I'm guessing he or she would like to see findings not patented at all.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  You've seen how well our patent system works. If the findings were not patented by somebody, Big Corp. would just download the whitepaper, print it, submit it to the patent office and get the patent.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    An un-patent then, ie anybody can use this thing that taxes paid to develop.
    - 1457389 13y ago
      So let's say I discover a potentially groundbreaking new pathway that can be exploited by a new drug candidate to attack a major disease. Now who is going to go put in $350 million to get that drug candidate through PhI/II/III and beyond, with little guarantee of success, if they have no IP protection to stand on? Why would any rational investor fund such an endeavor when anyone else can step in once all the hard work (averaging $5 billion per successful drug) is done and reap the rewards?

tbagman 13y ago

It's a complex situation, as other posters have noted. Here's another complication. Often, faculty need multiple sources of funding over the years to support their research, including federal grants, university support (direct through money or indirect through facilities and staff), and industrial support through gifts and grants. As well, the intellectual heavy-lifting is done by the faculty and their students. If you believe in intellectual property rights, then who of all of these stakeholders deserves ownership of those rights? Personally, I lean against faculty patenting their inventions. I'd rather the IP is open to the public. Even if a faculty member wants to commercialize their research, I think they are better off competing in the marketplace rather than through IP arsenals. But, I understand the other point of view. Patent licensing is a lucrative source of revenue for universities (e.g., UFL and its Gatorade revenue) and inventors. As well, it's at least uncomfortable and perhaps unfair if opportunistic companies were able to commercialize on a faculty member's invention without renumeration or attribution. Complicated topic.

dominotw 13y ago

>It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'. Wouldn't that mean that researchers would be less motivated ?

hrkristian 13y ago
No, it means motivation would come from elsewhere, we're -as a society- just sinking further and further into a mindset where money is the one and only way for anything to get done. Sickening. The hammer was invented in spite of the fact it was impossible to control the proliferation of its design.
sparkie 13y ago
I doubt it. Many researchers aren't businessmen, the simply want to scratch an itch, and not want to work tedious day jobs. If they can make a living while doing something they enjoy, all is great. Except that very rarely does wanting to scratch an itch coincide with obtaining funds to do so. As a result, the researcher needs to make concessions to his own research goals, or the quality of it, in order to convince people who don't understand it that it has some value, in order to finance it. If not, they're gonna be stuck researching something they have little or no interest in, or back to the day job. This is the real motivation killer.

cowsandmilk 13y ago

I agree with some of your sentiment, but you shouldn't blame the academics. There are many academics who are no longer allowed to use things they invented them because the patent goes to the university. As a well-known example, John Pople wrote a program called Gaussian while at Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon licensed the program to Gaussian Inc. When John Pople moved to Northwestern, he was banned from using the program he wrote, as was all of Northwestern University. Before the passage of Bayh-Dole, Gaussian was given out for free by Carnegie Mellon. Once Bayh-Dole gave them clear rights in the code, everything changed.

pmorici 13y ago

You think that is bad? There is a whole class of small company that all they do is apply for government development grants and contracts which amount to funding to develop IP which otherwise wouldn't exist. The company then gets to keep all the IP they developed on the governments dime and if they made anything worthwhile sell it to the government at exorbitant prices.