Slashdot Mirror
JPL Begins Commercialization
An anonymous reader writes "JPL has always been concerned with how their work has benefitted society and the Earth as a whole. Everything from developing tools to study what causes El Nino/La Nina to helping find sources of pollution in our environment. In an effort to continue their work while decreasing their burden on NASA's budget, JPL will introduce the JPL Commercialization Center. This means they will begin developing relationships with commercial entities to adapt their technologies for public use. The public benefit is two-fold since licensing fees will help ease NASA and taxpayer burden and life-enchancing technologies will be put into public use."
Eh. Imagine my surprise when I discovered... I'm a retard.
The Jet Propulsion Lab is part of CalTech. It is decidedly an NGO. My post is completely offtopic. It might not look that way in metamod, so feel free to use "overrated" on it. As cowardly as I would normally consider that move, go ahead.
Anyway, I'm still curious if a government agency is ever allowed to hold a copyright. But that curiousity is offtopic.
I'll go sit down now.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
NASA's budget is less than .5% of the entire federal budget, and JPL is worried about the taxpayer burden they are being??? How completely asinine. Why aren't all the meaningless bureaucratic positions in the Department of Commerce, the Export Import Bank, and all the other do-nothing federal agencies expressing this kind of worry over the taxpayer burden they pose?
At least JPL help keep us at the forefront of various technologies for 40+ years. What has the Department of Commerce ever done for the average American?
Go Lakers!
From what I've read,
"With one exception, works of the United States government are public
domain. 17 U.S.C. 105. The only exception is for standard reference
data produced by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under the Standard
Reference Data Act, 15 U.S.C. 290e."
But this only applies to things produced by the federal government. If it's a work produced by someone else (university, advertiser, etc) and the federal government licenses it, it doesn't become public domain. So those Sept 11th commercials are most likely not public domain, and university research done with federal money is not necessarily public domain.
You are correct and it is something not widely known! Actually as I understand it, NASA HQ issues one big contract to Caltech to run JPL for NASA. There are very few NASA government employees at JPL but mostly Caltech employees whose paycheck is issued by Caltech, not NASA. This becomes even more complicated when JPL turns around and issues a subcontract to a 3rd party (i.e. Lockheed) for missions such as Mars Polar Lander etc. as Lockeed reports to Caltech (JPL) which in turn reports to NASA (NASA HQ plus a few bonefide NASA employees on-site to manage the JPL contract). My son, who graduated from Caltech suggested that missions run strictly by Caltech for NASA had a high success rate, but those subcontracted out by JPL to a third parties (i.e. Lockheed) often ran into management communications problems which the NASA inquiry pointed to in the two Mars failures. Hope this clarifies that JPL is not "strictly" NASA. Legally, since JPL (Caltech) is not a government entity but a contractor (just like Boeing or Lockheed) it owns all copyrights and inventions unless it's NASA HQ contract retains such rights for NASA. This is most likely as otherwise this slashdot story from the JPL (Caltech) Press Release would not have been issued in the first place.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
Actually, no -- government held patents and copyrights are not public domain.
... maybe your town wasn't quite like my town. Quite like it -- these were stories from Harrisonburg, VA, and VA Tech. But I'm willing to bet that it's not too different from ours. I've seen this kind of thing in too many places.
As much as any real property, they are subject to the Condemnation/Privatization cycle of transferring property from poor people/businesses to wealthy people and businesses.
As I remember, ("Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynmann) during the Manhatten Project, they asked for and claimed the patent ideas of the scientists working on the projects. So Feynmann, in exchange for a tiny party, provided them with the patents for such things as nuclear powered ships, nuclear subs, nuclear airplanes, and such. Those aren't public domain; and the beneficiary of these patents is the US Government.
Or think back to your own town: remember all those properties that the town council condemned? Remember all those lucrative contracts that went out to companies owned by members of the town council? And the $3000 dead-town-district lots that suddenly got sold as $120k "Parking"? Or the university that traded its valuable property between the university town and the nearest commercial center (on the main road), in an acre-for-acre swap for flood-plane land with its Athletic Director? Or the mayor who got free land from the city for "improving downtown", a free building from the feds for "a medical complex", put his own "doctor's office" on the top floor, and rented the rest to the US Park Service, moving them out of the US Post Office across the street?
Ummm
Anything the government owns is NOT public domain. It is very specifically private domain, and headed into the hands of someone more powerful than you.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If a private company wants to fund JPL, they're not funding JPL to do it on the cheap. Any work JPL does for them is paid for by them. If anything, they probably get a better workforce per dollar ratio in house than they do funding JPL. All the money that they give us goes through NASA because of the JPL Prime Contract with NASA. Industry pays NASA, NASA takes their cut, pays Caltech, Caltech takes their cut, give it to JPL, and then the standard burden overhead rates apply. We're still pretty good compared to industry for burden rates, but suck for FFRDCs and Universities in general. What industry is paying for is our experience and focus in new technologies. They're hoping we can leverage past work and our skills into a new technology.
Now while I apreciate the Industry funding, I strongly believe that there should be more Government funding for raw new technology research and development. The Government has always been, and will always be an anchor tennant for technologies and that are too far into the future for common industry. Many of the technologies we take for granted today started out as wholly developed or heavily subsidized projects of the US Government. The telecommunications industry, the Internet, high performance computing in general, GPS, and the Airline industry just to name a very short list of things. I strongly believe that we can and should colonize space, however I think it is a big mistake to do it with manned exploration first. Although I don't think JPL will be the only organization to do it, I do think JPL will be and should be the foundation of solar system exploration and travel developments in the future.
"Applied Research" is not the only thing JPL does, but it does do it well. We do have our dreamers that come up with things no one has thought before, those dreamers feed it to our second level visionaries in society that hopefully will have the wisdom to point us in the right direction and tell us (me) what to work on.
There are also things called SBIRs (Small Business Innovative Research, IIRC). They're small, multi-level grants to small buisinesses that each large agency or organization that receives Government funding has to participate in. Grants are given in stages for new technology development.... Paper study, prototype, and so forth up the technology readiness levels. Those I believe are beneficial and allows industry to participate in the bleeding edge. Those are the types of programs are what I think you're talking about and those types of subsidies should continue. Why let the FFRDCs have all the fun. We get stagnant too.
--Carlos V.