Slashdot Mirror
Removing Obstacles on Joint Research
Mark_Uplanguage writes "The New York Times is reporting that a conglomeration of 7 universities and 4 industry partners have agreed to open up software created out of industry funding. From the article: 'The tone was set, Ms. Mitchell said, by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed universities to hold the patents on federally funded research and to license that intellectual property to industry [...]The guidelines and framework for the agreement will [be] posted this week at www.ibm.com/university, and at the Kauffman foundation's site, www.kauffman.org.' It's nice to see people sharing again."
1. Mega Corp gives much needed $ to University research department
2. University researchers and grad students do research and gain knowledge and experience
3. Mega Corp gets research results
4. Profit
5. GOTO 1
Any research is good research. Nobody set out to make penecilin, it was just sort of discovered. And if you look to the history of invention, its usually the product of unrelated research. Any agreement that helps research is good for everyone. Aswell, given that the US economy is suffering due to lack of research, this should simply be embraced.
QED
The idea behind allowing private companies to buy the patents on federally funded research came from the fact that there were so many projects with great ideas, and very few actually turning into products that people could use. So, a law was passed to let companies get patents on the ideas; then they would have the field to themselves for a little while, and could (therefore) hopefully have an incentive to actually look at the ideas, and turn them into real products.
It all sounded nice, and like it should work.
What's actually happened is now every research idea gets a patent by some big company, which then ignores it just as they did before. Only now there's a patent saying everyone else has to ignore it as well...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
since they reference the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, and the patent term prior to 1995 was 17 years from grant or 20 years from application, they're just talking about making available stuff where the patents have expired anyway, but trying to get good PR for doing so. i.e. stuff prior to 1985 or 1988.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Correct as far as it goes but you've missed a bit:
Mega Corp gets extra research results partly subsidized by taxpayer funding.
Not saying that you're wrong here, just that it's very important in any arrangement that involves taxpayers' money that you identify all the costs and benefits.
Unfortunately, in any mixed private/public funding scenario it's all too easy to engage in dodgy accounting practices, everything from company tax avoidance to free advertising to biased education to academic feather nesting. I'm wary of such arrangements simply because it is too easy.
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Keep your options open!