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."

Comments

Re:Scam

[Daniel_Staal]

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...