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Some Schools Welcoming Patent Firm, Others Wary
theodp writes "Intellectual Ventures (IV) will be setting up shop at the top of a Four Seasons this week as Headline Sponsor of the Ready to Commercialize 2008 conference hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It's the patent firm's 100th university deal, though some, such as Professor Michael Heller at Columbia University, warn against such deals. '... their individual profit comes at the cost of the public ability to innovate. The university's larger mission is to serve the public interest, and some of these deals work against that public interest.' It's a follow-up to the conference IV sponsored last summer for technology transfer professionals entrusted with commercializing their universities' intellectual property, and should help IV, a friend of Microsoft, snag even more exclusive deals (PDF)."
With laws as outrageously stupid as some of the current patent laws, it's frankly time to start ignoring them.
... and should help IV, a friend of Microsoft
Well, I'll tell you what, my friend. IV is a roman numeral, so despite your best efforts, you have won! And you wagered...
The interest in "public interest" is a sham. The Stallman movement has as its goal to kill off proprietary software, which is not in the public interest.
Once open source software is developed to a certain standard (through any speed and regularity of development, regardless of service standards or the existence of a commercial support providing organisation, regardless of whether developers stay in place or leave), then the "hurdle cost" of developing proprietary software that is competitive in terms of feature set will be prohibitive. As a result no investments will be made in the software field unless developers of uncertain quality randomly decide to contribute to it, or, a company is happy to fund development that will be shared with all their competitors.
If there was a law stating that factories are only allowed to exist if they publish the exact blueprints of their manufacturing systems, would that be helpful or harmful to the economy? If anything it means you can no longer gain a competitive advantage by investing in manufacturing systems.
If they cared about public interest, the natural choice would be to support that companies should be able to include open source software in their products, with proprietary functionality added on.
what more needs to be said?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"The primary ingredient in any relationship."
-CJ, Dawn of the Dead
Although many patents (both software and hardware) are bogus, the basic concept of the patent system has some validity and there are conditions where patents serve the public interest by encouraging innovation and at the same time making knowledge available to the public which would otherwise be kept as tight trade secrets by companies. In the case of universities, they have been loosing other sources of public funding and so earning some money from patent licensing may not inherently be a bad thing, but there should be requirements for patents obtained based on publicly funded research that although licensing fees could be charged for use by private companies, other universities and other publicly funded research institutions should be allowed to use the technology royalty free.
Especially Bill G.
Here's where you should go to post like that.
I know this is a really silly idea, but I can't seem to stop dreaming.
Universities can:
Darn, I've gonna stop inhaling hallucinogens, and start following the money instead!
Again, patents were created as a bridge between creators and the market to promote progress. They have mutated into trolls that prevent progress. Patents are now a monster that must be slain.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Don't shoot yourself in the foot, stay in school and push for better laws. You don't have to work for an unethical company when you get out, just those that think "ignorance is bliss" when it comes to patent law - there never was finer proof that patents offer no real protection to inventors. Software patents should be abolished so the patent office can get back to enforcing real patents.
The number of Universities falling for this has been grossly understated. The article itself says:
This means that the deals are often with the same suckers but are not exclusive by a long shot. Stanford and MIT have the right idea. I predict IV will be found guilty of fraud and self dealing. It would be easy for Bill Gates and friends to make one or two universities a lot of money by paying for a few select patents while sucking a much larger volume of money out of the rest of the pawns and one night stands.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
loose != lose
The Fûhrer is not amused!
For what it's worth, one is an Ivy League university in New York City, the other is not. TFS is wrong but TFA is right; the editor and/or submitter must be having trouble with copy and paste.
Anyone else see the abbreviation "IV" in the summary and immediately think "four"?
Every time some group of social activists and NGO's screams about boycotting this that and the other Israeli institution, particularly academic institutions I start to lobby those academic institutions to increase royalty fees they charge those self same academic and NGO groups that already reap the benefit of the research of Israeli institutions they now claim to want to boycott. So for instance if the UK Academic Union wants to boycott all Israeli Universities then they should pay 5 or 10x what they do now while they use the intellectual property of those institutions they want to boycott. The choice should be up to them to pay or not and if they were as moral and ethical as they say they would not pay and put their money where their mouth is. All I propose is to make that decision easy for them.
... the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed the privatization of the results of research done at public Universities, needs to be repealed.
Public money should NOT be spent to set up University professors and their friends in lucrative businesses. Not only is that unethical in the extreme, it is a mirror of what the Bush Administration has done with public funds and private interests.
Intellectual Vultures
... I think "Intellectual Vultures".