Slashdot Mirror

Here's a link to another story in the Capital Times (in Madison, Wisconsin). It puts more emphasis on interviews with researchers at the WARF. They claim that they are being very responsible with a patent, far more so than a private corporation would be if it owned the patent.

Unfortunately, the practice of licensing out research to private corporations has become common practice at the University of Wisconsin and other big research universities. Grad students sometimes do the work on research where the company gets to keep all IP gained from the research.

The problem is that the state keeps cutting our funds every year, so the university constantly has to search for new sources of funding. The administration sees private companies as a source for this research money. However, the gain from private grants, etc., is often offset by the expenses the UW incurs by building new facilities for this corporate-owned research. We still end up footing huge bills, but then the public doesn't own the result.

The researchers do have a point: at least a university research institution owns this patent, and they are concerned with the benefits of research, not profiteering. Many patents from university research now go to corporations. For example, earlier this year some UW researchers were given "free" access to Third Wave Technologies' proprietary Invader OS in exchange for promising Third Wave the right to develop any discoveries, which I assume means pursuing patents based on the UW researchers' work.