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NASA To Auction Automated Code Generation Patents

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept.

coondoggie writes "NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said it is set to auction an exclusive license to five patents it holds for automated software development on November 11, 2010. NASA said the technology was originally developed to handle coding of control code for spacecraft swarms, but it is applicable to any commercial application where rule-based systems development is used."

29 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. i'm sorry... by gandhi_2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    i was kind of thinking that since, you know, WE payed NASA to invent stuff.. the public already owned it.

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    THL phish sticks
    1. Re:i'm sorry... by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      By that logic we also paid the gov't to go into trillions of dollars in debt with other countries... so the public owns that too. No thanks.

    2. Re:i'm sorry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, the public does own that.

    3. Re:i'm sorry... by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And who do you suppose is eventually going to pay that debt? Here's a hint, unless you make $100 million a year or so, you are.

      Meanwhile, back on topic, I'm the biggest NASA nerd there is, but software patents are evil, I don't care who owns them.

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      No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    4. Re:i'm sorry... by MSTCrow5429 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The government can't copyright, so I'm baffled at it being able to patent.

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    5. Re:i'm sorry... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 3, Informative

      Here's a hint, unless you make $100 million a year or so, you are.

      This is what happens when you let talking heads let you confuse tax percentage rates with actual tax dollars paid.

      Fact is that the top earners of the country pay the vast majority of all income tax dollars I thought I did a post last week where I showed the math and sourced appropriate irs.gov docs, but I can't find it.

      The gist: The numbers showed that the top 1% of earners paid something like 30% of ALL tax dollars received (as of 2008 - when things were supposed to be best for "the rich" due to Bush); the top 5% paid over 50%; and the top 10% paid something like 70%.

      In other words, those in the remaining 90% of income earners pay ~30% of all tax dollars. And those who fall under to top 50% of income earners pay something like 3% of all tax dollars.

      Those numbers aren't as much fun to report as "Bill passed to extend tax breaks for THE RICH", but that's our media for you.

      Here's a hint, unless you make $100 million a year or so, you are.

    6. Re:i'm sorry... by geekoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't. It would be better to put the code, or any patent, into public domain for US citizens. That way I, or anyone, can use ti as a foundation for innovation and new business; which in turn generate more tax dollars.

      The US gets a huge ROI from NASA.

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      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    7. Re:i'm sorry... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In case you hadn't noticed, the government was purchased by a consortium of corporations when Reagan got elected.

      Nothing new to see here. Move along folks. Move along....

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    8. Re:i'm sorry... by shaitand · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you make $100 million you pay a higher number of dollars but a smaller portion relative to your income.

      No don't quote tax rates at me. There are a million and one tax tricks and shelters the wealthy utilize to shrink their income on paper to almost nothing. If there is anyone reporting $100 million who didn't make at least a couple billion then I'm the pope.

    9. Re:i'm sorry... by shaitand · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The fact is the top 1% used to pay 60% so their share of the taxes has been cut in half. The fact is that the top 10% have over 95% of the wealth so they SHOULD be paying 95% of all taxes.

    10. Re:i'm sorry... by shaitand · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "Ok, so I see this a lot but what never seem to be mentioned is what percentage of total income is make by the people in those upper brackets. "

      That is because it is difficult to generate those numbers. The best you can do is find what they reported. What is called tax evasion for you and I is called tax planning for them. There isn't anyone in the top 1% who is paying taxes on even 1% of the money they make.

      Instead you look at total wealth and they hold well over 95% of the wealth in this nation.

    11. Re:i'm sorry... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I sourced mine directly from the aggregate tax data on IRS.gov (as I suspect that individual did as well - it's fascinating information in a way)

      Both sides like to slant that information to their own perspective, usually by mixing percentages and hard numbers inappropriately -- making the data say whatever they want. The same information could just as easily say that the richest Americans pay tax at only 10% (or whatever) -- by ignoring the actual dollar contributions, they paint "The Rich" as getting off easy.

      The slant on that blog post is a bit misleading in the other direction in saying the bottom 50% pay almost no taxes though -- 2-3% of the national tax bill isn't the same as saying 2-3% income tax rate; if you're paying 15% of 40k a year, that's not "almost nothing" to you.

    12. Re:i'm sorry... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 2, Informative

      Did you even read that page? It describes how the top 5% of income earners are shouldering 59% of the federal tax burden. That fact doesn't directly have anything to do with rates.

      Since the top 5% own 95% of the wealth in this country, that hardly seems fair.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    13. Re:i'm sorry... by Pseudonym+Authority · · Score: 3, Informative
      He's close enough that the difference is negligible.

      In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).

    14. Re:i'm sorry... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The fact is the top 1% used to pay 60% so their share of the taxes has been cut in half.

      Citation? Remember we're talking about total tax dollars received here, not income tax

      The fact is that the top 10% have over 95% of the wealth so they SHOULD be paying 95% of all taxes.

      This has little to do with tax on annual income. Further: you're saying that mere act of having a lot of "wealth" should be punishable by giving it to the government? For that matter, who gets to define "a lot" and what the threshold is?

      It's a sad state of affairs when there's a need to defend somebody wanting to keep substantially more of his own income than he gives to the government.

    15. Re:i'm sorry... by Albertosaurus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So to make things fair you're suggesting that

      a) The top 5% should pay 95% of the federal tax burden, and
      b) said top 5% should also have 95% of the voting power in federal elections.

      Anything else would hardly be fair. After all, if a person has to shoulder a disproportionate share of the upkeep costs of the country he should be entitled to an equally disproportionate share of the political franchise.

  2. Prior Art hits me again by russlar · · Score: 3, Funny

    Blast! There goes my plan to file a patent for "Method for auctioning patents".

    Curse you, Prior Art!

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    1. Re:Prior Art hits me again by nullifi · · Score: 2, Funny

      Don't give up just yet, maybe the patent office won't remember the prior art.

  3. this is really a sad by nimbius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    revelation. Billions of dollars in TARP spending and two wars heavily funded without so much as an eyebrows raise...but one of the foremost scientific research and exploration communities in the united states, dare i even say the world, which recently help design the rescue and recovery vehicle for trapped mine workers, now has to hold the equivalent of a technology "bake sale" for funding. when does this stop?

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    Good people go to bed earlier.
  4. Doh! Missed a chance at a patent. by jbeaupre · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm sure we were not the first, nor as sophisticated, but in 1994 we wrote a program to write programs.

    The port for sending commands to a robot was physically missing. The RS232 port was reserved for the terminal. So we connected a serial cable up to the robot controller and a pc. Then we wrote a program that would send the keystrokes to open a file for editing, edit it, save the program, and execute it. So when the pc would get a signal, it would calculate a trajectory for the robot, open the file on the controller, write the program, close it, then run it. Around 10 times a second.

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    The world is made by those who show up for the job.
  5. So instead of enhancing everyone's software... by paulsnx2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .... One company for $250,000 can prohibit the application of this idea to systems that do not pay up.

    This is what is wrong with this deal, off the top of my head:

    1) NASA would have developed this technology anyway, one must assume, as they haven't auctioned patents in the past (at least, not that I know of). In any case, how could the patent have been a motivator to do the work? Wouldn't it have been the problem they needed to solve? And who believes 250K is enough of a motivator for NASA anyway?
    2) Now that we have the innovation done, all the patent is going to do is prevent its application for 20 years
    3) Many companies have been generating test cases from Rules for years. Isn't there a prior art issue here?
    4) Why should we fund government research only to tie it up with IP on a restrictive basis for only 250K? How is this a good deal for the Tax Payer? (It would be different if the income to government was big enough to offset the Taxes we pay, but this doesn't do that)
    5) Software Patents! Evil! They are most certainly a mechanism to patent ideas rather than implementations, as there are far too many ways to implement an algorithm in software to restrict the patent to an actual invention.

  6. Sickening by Concern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    NASA hurts it's own reputation horribly by auctioning software patents rather than holding them for the public trust and acknowledging the obvious: software patents are incompatible with a software industry.

    They then compound the insult by taking advantage of some suckers paying cash for something that is legally questionable in light of Bilksi and that may soon have explicitly no value at all.

    It's an obvious fact. The sooner we stop denying it and explicitly repudiate software patents as a matter of policy (as most every advanced nation already does), the sooner the damage to our economy stops.

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    1. Re:Sickening by No.+24601 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      NASA hurts it's own reputation horribly by auctioning software patents rather than holding them for the public trust and acknowledging the obvious: software patents are incompatible with a software industry.

      Agreed. Moreover (but completely the opposite of you), I fully expect NASA to receive substantially less than what these assets are worth. Government auctions have the habit of turning into fire sales on public investment.

  7. And they are only expecting $250,000 for it by jaweekes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And they are only expecting $250,000 for it??? I wonder how much the purchasing company will make from it? I'm betting a hell of a lot more. Why don't they just license it out, and have a continuous income from it?

  8. Re:I should probably rtfa by Gorobei · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It looks more like they are patenting "nothing much at all." As in, "here are some use cases, here is a state machine that implements them, run our program, find questionable state transitions, ask users to decide what happens in those cases. Repeat until you have a complete formal spec."

    This looks more like a case of a small group of people trying to justify their continued employment by pointing to their patents/minor revenue generated as evidence that they are doing something useful and so should not be laid off.

  9. A little homework... by goodmanj · · Score: 2, Informative

    It seemed weird that the US government should be in the patent game, so I did a little homework.

    This document shows the number of patents held by US government agencies. The total is over 30,000 -- as usual, Slashdot is posting old news! The majority are held by the armed forces; DOE and NASA hold several thousand each.

    At first, this seems appalling: why should the US gubmint, which we're paying taxes to support, make patents to keep us from using the products of its research? But think about it from a different perspective: if US agencies' inventions went into the public domain, than anyone who wanted could pick them up for free and potentially make billions off them, without doing a bit of R&D on their own. Isn't it more fair to ask the people who want to use government inventions for profit to pony up some cash? It's not like that money's going to pay for the NASA chief's next yacht: it's going right back into more research at NASA Goddard. Net result: more inventions!

    It's really the same idea as patents held by universities. Patentable inventions are not their primary focus, but they do naturally arise from the universities' activities. If they *don't* patent them, the ideas get snapped for free by some undeserving entrepreneur who's spawn camping the university. If they do patent them, the license profits go to improving teaching and research at the university.

    1. Re:A little homework... by geekoid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, that means you, or I, could use the software as the foundation for a new company. we could compete in the market, and yes, maybe make billions. But then that would generate more taxes.

      Right now, someone is going to buy those patents and make money. All funded by you and me.

      More people will start more business and generate more tax revenue. NASA selling patents is only going to give the people that want NASA cut an incentive to disproportional cut it's budget.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  10. Don't like it? by geekoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Email your rep. I did. Be clear and stay on this specific issues. Do not drift into a patents are evil rant. save that for a different email. Explain why you feel the patents should be made public and not auctioned.

    It just so happens that my rep is on the Committee for science and technology. But let them know.

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    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  11. this is why WE should own the researcher's IP by mschaffer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "WE" paid for the research, so WE should own the intellectual property. We paid for it. If the Universities want to own it outright, don't take public money!