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NASA Patents To Be Auctioned

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the free-pair-of-scissors-for-the-red-tape dept.

Presto Vivace writes to tell us that as a continuing push to commercialize NASA-funded technology a group of 25 NASA patents will be auctioned off this coming October. "The sale, which will include rights to signal processing, GPS for spacecraft and sensor technologies, is the first auction under a partnership announced earlier this month between Goddard's Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP) and Ocean Tomo Federal Services LLC. Ocean Tomo provides a marketplace for intellectual property, which NASA wants to leverage in commercializing its technology."

7 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Auctioned off? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those patents belong to the American people!

  2. Great, we get to pay for them again! by Eric+Smith · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As a US taxpayer, I already funded the research that led to these patents. Now they'll sell them off, which superficially sounds like a good thing. But the reality is that it means that I get to pay for them again. The companies buying the patents aren't ultimately the ones paying, it's those of us that buy products from those companies.

    The results of taxpayer-funded research need to be made freely available, not sold to the highest bidder.

    1. Re:Great, we get to pay for them again! by morikahnx · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe NASA is planning on paying us back?

    2. Re:Great, we get to pay for them again! by BitterOldGUy · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Ah. So the American Corp who would get these patents (by lottery or by political connections), saving money on R&D, can now pass the savings on to the CEO in terms of even higher salary and perks. He earned it after all by saving the company millions of dollars in R&D costs.

      In the meantime, NASA doesn't get to recover the costs that they spent (our tax dollars) and therefore has to beg Congress for more money. Congress, on the other hand, has things they would rather spend money on: wars, pork barrel spending, things that buy votes from joe sixpack who doesn't give a rat's ass about space - space science is one of those "elitist" pursuits, bridges to no-where, tax breaks to big oil, tax breaks to big corps who've lobbied for them, their own increasing salaries and perks, etc....

      Sorry, I didn't mean to sound bitter.

    3. Re:Great, we get to pay for them again! by CodeBuster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But the reality is that it means that I get to pay for them again.

      Suppose instead that you were the sole owner of the patents, but for some reason (you choose) you didn't want to spend money to develop and market products based upon the patents, even though you might personally be interested in buying whatever products are ultimately produced using the patents. Would you not be happy with a cash settlement from the sale of your patents? Presumably you could still purchase whatever products came out of the patents and enjoy them while paying a small share of what the patent buyer paid you (in the form of a higher product price) in exchange for a product that you want. How is this not a good deal?

      Now, in theory it would be better if all of us taxpayers saw some "return" on our investment in the form of lower taxes going forward based upon the proceeds of a successful sale of patents generated from publicly funded research. However, in practice any proceeds will probably go to NASA and not be returned to the US Treasury so in that sense the US taxpayer is getting a bit of the shaft. On the other hand, maybe some useful products, which wouldn't otherwise be available to the public, will come of this so it may not all be bad.

      If the patents were made freely available then other countries and foreign companies could free-ride and enjoy the fruits of our research efforts without reimbursing us for any of the costs that we have already paid for the research. How would that make you feel? Perhaps you prefer that nobody earns any profit, even though your tax dollars are already a sunk cost either way, just to spite the winning bidders? Either way you still paid for the research and got no direct return.

    4. Re:Great, we get to pay for them again! by evilklown · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would like to be the first to suggest a class action lawsuit against both the government and the highest bidder. I wish not to recoup any money but, as previously mentioned, I would like these breakthroughs (made possible by tax-funded research) to be freely available to any citizen of the United States. I think it's time we, the taxpayers, set a precedence for publicly funded research to be publicly available.

  3. We own NASA by kwerle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Your cut is a wealthier NASA.