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

Link to the proposal...

[MLopat]

Here's a link to the story from Kauffman's Website.

The part that concerns me about this effort is the wording... "Specifically, the companies and universities agreed: * That intellectual property arising from selected research collaborations will be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use."

Its the idea that selected research will be available. Any research with *any* sort of monetary benefits will likely not fall under the scope of this program. So while this may perpetuate the research aspects of these IP's, its unlikely that industry will benefit, and thereby very unlikely that end consumers will see any benefit to this agreement.

Scam

[pete-classic]

Can someone please explain to me any way in which this is not a big rip-off of the American taxpayer?

Also, is there some reason that this doesn't story doesn't link to an article somewhere?

-Peter

Some suggestions

[grub]

Removing Obstacles on Joint Research

First make sure you have a clean surface to roll on.

Ensure all twigs and seeds are removed from the pot.

Grind it up to a nice fine consistency.

Don't lick the paper too much or it'll get soggy.

Re: Is university research "fair-use" anymore?

[Black Parrot]

> As I understand the situation (IANAL), one of the most important tests for "fair-use" of protected IP is whether profit is involved -- if you make a profit on someone else's IP, you can't claim fair-use.

That's not correct. Otherwise bootlegging would be perfectly legal, so long as you gave it away instead of selling it. And conversely, you wouldn't be able to sell a newspaper that quoted someone's book, even if proper attribution was given.

Beyond that, there's a sort of war on the fair use doctrine going on in the USA anyway, as part of the general shift in IP law that the *AA has been pursuing.