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Intel Mandates Universities Receiving Funds Not File Patents
sproketboy writes "Since January, four U.S. universities have agreed to host Intel Science and Technology Centers that will be funded at the rate of $2.5 million a year for five years. But wait, there's a catch: the company has made it a condition that in order to receive the millions, your university must open source any resulting software and inventions that come out of this research funding."
Intel NOT acting anticompetitive?
While I like this idea, doesn't it cause problems with first to file?
I just imagine a scenario where a university discovers something, doesn't file a patent, and megacorp comes along and patents it. With first to file, Megacorp gets the patent.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but to me it would seem better that the university file the patent, but not be able to enforce it.
...as long as Intel makes all their software and inventions open source as well.
I like bashing faceless mega corporations as much as the next guy, but this seems to be ... a benign act.
The usual condition to financing basic research would be that any resulting patents would go to the company that provided the financing, not that they'd be placed in the open source community. Someone has either had a stroke or needs their meds checked. Likely both.
It doesn't prevent AMD benefiting from the useful technology, it just prevents the patents. That's the ideal situation. They're providing an incentive to invent things without the temporary monopoly.
Intel simply doesn't want to pay for patents on ideas generates with its financial support. Here's the precedent they are trying to prevent from happening again: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1557536/intel-settles-university-wisconsin
Hope it sticks. Also should result in more of the money going to research instead of being used up on patent fees.
Yup, so I'll do the grunt work on intel's dime, and when I make a discovery I will wait a year or so later and patent my own invention.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Not a huge deal, really. They can still patent other ideas, just not anything that was researched with Intel's funding. If you think you'll want a patent on it, use other funds instead.
Bite my shiny metal ass!
If that turns out to be the case, then all the better for Intel to fund it instead of the taxpayers.
Not to mention tuition.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You get to a point where you realize that as soon as you spend a shitload of money trying to corner the market on something, the time you've wasted ends up giving the competition a leg-up in a new area you SHOULD have been spending that time and energy working on.
Just open source fucking everything and use it to make money on support. There is no gross margin in hardware anymore, and none in the perceivable future -- and Intel knows it.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Based on my own observations, this story is complete bullshit. Professor Goodnough at UT Austin invented the most practical methods for manufacturing LiFePO4 batteries and two key patents were granted in the late 90s. LiFePO4 is a great battery technology that is very stable and has the right voltages to replace lead-acid batteries. It is considerably more expensive, but there many applications where it would be much more desirable than lead-acid.
UT Austin never really cared about getting the technology to be manufactured. The licensing that they granted has, with few exceptions, only resulted in shutting down anyone who attempts to make LiFePO4 batteries. This is the complete opposite of what most private firms do after spending huge sums of money to develop a technology.
Apparently someone at UT Austin actually figured this out because starting this year, they have much loosened up their licensing requirements such that companies are now interested in using the technology since they may be able to actually make a profit (the previous license requirement was so ridiculous nobody was interested ). So, for the last few years before the patent enters public domain, marketers can begin to introduce consumers to the advantages of LiFePO4 batteries, however, my suspicion is that adoption will initially be slow, and UT Austin has lost out on probably at least a few hundred million dollars.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Don't get me wrong - I think this sounds like a fantastic idea by Intel. But is $2.5 mil a year (spit in the ocean for Intel) enough enticement to get a research university to forego any future revenues and other benefits of holding patents. Apparently it was at Carnegie Mellon . . . maybe i'm overestimating their annual research budgets . . . or perhaps overestimating the value of patents?
So why aren't we doing this with the national science foundation as well? Shouldn't research paid for "by the people" be available "to the people"?
Now if only the government would grow some balls and make the same condition for government research grants...
... someone else will. We have a first to file situation here. This is RIDICULOUSLY dumb on Intel's part. A nice sentiment, better executed by stating, "All fruits of this research must be patented by this foundation we've set up, which allows open, free licensing to anybody and everybody." Defensive patents are the only security you have; non-patent clauses just guarantee somebody other than your allies will patent! Ask Google, specifically whomever wrote the $12.1 billion check to acquire defensive patents from Motorola.
They're probably doing this because universities were selling the patents to companies that would then compete with Intel.
It doesn't prevent AMD benefiting from the useful technology, it just prevents the patents. That's the ideal situation. They're providing an incentive to invent things without the temporary monopoly.
Agreed. I see nothing at all wrong with this restriction.
Given that Intel funded them they could have asked for ownership, but instead asked for Open Sourcing any developments. Good on Intel.
Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.
I simply can't get incensed about this. Its a clever way to give back to society something bigger than you have in your own inventory.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Sounds like Intel is basically crowdsourcing the universities for it's research. They can go back and apply for the patents themselves.
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I wish the US government would take a similar approach -- any royalties a university receives should go back to the government in the proportion of the funding provided. If a university payed for research costs with 50% from the government then royalties from the patent should be split 50% with the government. If the government provided 100% funding, then 100% of the royalties should go beck to the government. In doing this, then the government is truly investing in research instead of just paying the bills.
I also would include corporations, too. If the government provides x% of funding for the creation of a new drug, then x% of the profits should come back to the government, since it is the taxpayer that footed the bill in the first place.
The other alternative is what Intel is proposing -- we will pay for the research, but everybody has the right to benefit from it.
I for one would like to say "thank you" to Intel. For once you've chosen not to go evil. Hopefully this "federal funding for state adoption of policy" style of coercion will catch on a bit more with respect to freeing up university research from patent encumbrance. Now if only a similar carrot could be invented and dangled in front of the rest of the corporate world. Tax breaks in proportion to the value of openly published not patented R&D...?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Nothing can be open with the incoming patent changes. The new first to file rule means I could file a patent on anything open, and they can't do jack.
I spent several hours learning the expected ramification on the law last weekend. You think it's borken now? ha!
You heard me!
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where do you make this up? Open sourcing enables competitors, like AMD, to get the benefits from the work without needing patents or any form of protection. How backwards are you?
I wonder if this move is influenced from patent madness occurring in the mobile world, where Intel is currently behind on the curve and wants to catch up.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Universities also make a lot of money on their prestige, through the tuition, grants, and endowments. Research is a very good way of getting said prestige, and thus the money that prestige brings.
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Totally valid concern, and likely one only manageable through the threat of withdrawn funding.
One thing that does concern me is while the drive for open source is laudable and comes with a lot of (however fuzzy) wider economic benefits, universities develop patents and create new companies to spin off. This makes a lot of dough for the institution and births a lot of companies well worth having - they are good, well paid jobs and they drive significant applied science (all the key people involved taking a cut is a big motivator).
The significant university shareholding also often means surprisingly good governance for a small upstart. Partly from a longer-term mindset, partly the pool of non-exec directors and partly a university typically attaches vastly greater importance to any risk to it's reputation than, say, a venture capitalist.
The funding is clearly overall a good thing, but that is a significant caveat.
Just open source fucking everything and use it to make money on support. There is no gross margin in hardware anymore, and none in the perceivable future -- and Intel knows it.
What a bunch of wishful thinking. You think Intel, AMD, and ARM are going to make the same amount of money if they just open sourced all their designs and relied on support? Intel is doing like IBM and other companies: Open sourcing at a limited level while still keeping their core products proprietary.
Hopefully they will eventually do the same with all research that's financed with taxes.
The summary says they have to open source any resulting software and inventions.
The only way to do this is to patent it and THEN open source it....but this costs money. Since the patent goes to the first to file, even in the US now I believe, this is the only way to do it safely.
IBM does make 90% of their money on support. Of course, support doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It doesn't mean answering the phone and saying 'no, click on the left button' it means saying 'well, we have these components, and you have these problems. We can solve your problems by deploying these components and writing these ones.' And that's always been where the big money has been in software: using it to solve real-world problems. Sometimes an off-the-shelf solution exists, but most of the time a company's problems are not quite the same as anyone else's, so the solution needs to be modified too.
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Of course they will. 90% of all worthwhile research fails to produce anything of use. If you know that the result will be useful, then it's development, not research.
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That's simply not going to work for companies like Intel. Besides, Intel is still making billions in hardware on a reasonable margin.
It's apparent from jobs.intel.com that Intel has a large appetite for employees who hold PhDs. Maybe they actually want more people to perform advanced research in semiconductors, computer science, and computer architecture, so they can hire those people? It certainly looks like they're willing to put their money where their appetite is. The "open source" provision is a no-brainier way of protecting themselves from having to pay royalties steaming from research they contribute to. At the very worst, it creates a barrier to entry (have to build their own lab) to other groups seeking to patent developments in those fields for exclusive use. I suppose it's possible that Intel is trying to limit the patentable research coming out of universities, but at least they're doing it with funding, and not political manipulations or lawsuits. Even in that case, research is funded and the fruits of that research become available to the public.
If intel really wanted the crown for graphics performance they'd go and get it. Seriously.
Mod parent up. Its not like intel's products are going to become free in the near future. Though I wonder, outside the rampant speculation that "all the money is in customization", how much of their income really comes from hardware sales, soft support contracts, custom hardware configuration, etc. It would really add some insight to this discussion to have those data points.
But Nvidias closed source linux drivers are still better.
My preference for awesome open source drivers but if my choice is for awesome binary blobs or sucky open source drivers
ill take binary blobs for $100 alex.
You are using the words "getting the benefit" as extremely specialized jargon.
(That's the nicest way I can phrase that.)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
It's decided that the advantages of patenting have started to flow less and less to companies like Intel, and more to patent trolls. Intel is not the bad guy here.
Therefore, it is in Intel's interest to fund research in areas it may want to commercialize, and simultaneously preclude patenting by insisting on open publication and no patenting.
In this scenario, the entity with the most money (i.e. somebody like Intel) wins if they have sufficient drive.
More realistically, they want to preclude the people funded by Intel to set up a startup on their own, one whose primary asset is the people and the patent estate. This way Intel can hire them as ordinary employees who are impoverished postdocs instead of having to first buy them out and then hire them.
The practice of universities patenting everything that comes out of their labs is a relatively recent thing, and arguably has decreased the rate that new companies have been created out of university research. Without the patents and with a wide publication of university research, everyone in the world has the potential to benefit from that research, but the team that did the research has the advantage of actually being skilled with the methods and techniques and some or all of them could start a company to exploit that skillset. Will patent encumbrance, those people need to get the IP from the university or industrial partner before they can start their new company.
>Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.
The public university that I attend applies for patents all the time (software patents being the ones that I know about). I've come to realize in my higher education that universities, even public ones, are just as cash hungry as corporations.
The people applying for the patents (the researchers) don't stand to make much money on their inventions and ideas. Any money made usually is funneled back into the school system to help support new research and education. Universities are cash hungry in a completely different way than corporations.
Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.
What should happen is the creator/inventor should have a right to any patents as a success incentive, and whoever supplies funding should be entitled to the rest, and name their terms as Intel is doing; universities already get plenty of money for hosting the research, they should definitely be paid their costs but they get that -- who thinks any significant portion of the $2.5 million goes directly to the use of researchers anyways?
NOPE. It goes to the university, and the researcher gets the use of research budget which is a limited percentage of that, the rest of it goes to pay for 'facilities' and 'administrative costs' of the university. Every resource of the university's the researcher uses also gets charged from the budget -- for example, "lab hours", "hours of computing on the time sharing system", "megabytes of data transferred over the university's T1", etc, all those activities create artificial fees the prof has to pay, at exorbitant rates also, hello $1000/hour to use a small lab.... and you thought cell phones were expensive. The phrase "Hollywood Accounting" comes to mind
The research budget isn't an incentive or reward for research, and the researcher gets paid nothing -- unless they're an employee, then they might receive a salary; still, it's not really fair compensation given the value of their work. So yes, I'm saying the average University is the bad guy in this situation.
[With] patent encumbrance, those people need to get the IP from the university or industrial partner before they can start their new company.
Zhengrong Shi is a perfect example, he invented something to do with solar tech while at Sydney university. He wanted to use the tech to spin of a company in Oz but the university sold the patent to a German company. Disheartened by the lack of support he returned to China to start his own company. 10yrs later he is now the richest man in mainland China, but still cannot use his own invention. He does not blame the university, he blames short-sighted politicians, to drive the point home he has donated to the university because in his words "it's under-funded".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
TBH, I would take it a notch further and say that anyone (including companies) who receives public funding should be required to render a public service by providing that information to the public. After all, the public paid for it.
Now, it obviously gets messier if a company only receives 2% of their funding from public sources for whatever purposes, but the research the comes out of that shouldn't go back into their secret portfolio. I'd be find with companies keeping things to themselves that they alone paid for, but the problem is that you'll always find someone willing to game the system.
He who has no
Hurrah for Intel for open sourcing discoveries made with their money.
Too bad our taxpayer money is wasted on private patents. My ex-Kansas Senator Bob Dole ruined university basic research when he was outgoing Senate Majority Leader and pressed through a law that effectively gives away the patent rights to all university research done with government taxpayer money. Before this change, all government research was 'open source' and belonged to everyone. Now, the patents and all the monies that accrue belong to the universities. The effect has been to damp basic research which has low probability of profitable patents, and fund only applied science with the possibility of profit for the university from taxpayer dollars. It's the old 'something for nothing' where universities are corrupted by chasing after the money rather than chasing after the science. This law needs to be repealed. It's admirable that a private corporation sees the folly in granting patent rights to universities doing research with someone else's money.
It's not even that restrictive; it's only dictating what they can do with the results of the research that was funded by Intel., i.e. it wouldn't apply to a different research group down the hall funded by AMD.
Another storm in a pisspot. fuelled by hot air generated by amateur lawyers like AK Mark who think a law can be adequately described by a three word summary.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Recently, we hosted a small-ish academic conference here at the university where I work, and I was one of the local organisers. Since we are in CS, potential sponsors are all the big name computing companies - Intel et. al.
Intel was very nice (it helped that we knew some researchers who work there, but still - everyone else was genuinely nice as well), and sponsored us. And interestingly, they have one non-negotiable condition for sponsoring academic conferences: the authors of presented papers *must* be allowed to put pre-prints of the papers (i.e. PDFs of the paper) on the web free of charge.
And that is a seriously cool think to ask for, because it prevents any sponsoring to go to the sort of conference which has papers disappear from general sight after publication, and only stores them behind a paywall of some sort. This is almost as important for research as the whole patents thing - *huge* kudos to Intel overall, someone has a major clue there!
A.
"Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents."
Sounds great, provided that the funding universities give up would come from extra public support. I'd be all for it, but I'm probably not in the majority.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Sounds like they should have a Dutch auction for these things - just drop the price of a patent license slowly until the first bidder is willing to pay it.
Sometimes I wonder where the good old logic has evaporated to. Sorry, but what sense does this make? And how does a moderator perceive this as contribution?
Open-Sourcing firstly allows everyone to make use of the results. Secondly, which patents are you talking about? Wasn't the TFA about no patents for the universities? And how does this fit into 'serious competition'? The *universities* must not ask for patents; so what does this have to make with Intel's competition? And even if you felt that - should Intel fear competition - they ought to ask for patents, this yet fails to make sense, since those licenses are *not* the same as public domain, so they protect the copyright *for* Intel; and maybe give Intel a leverage over AMD w.r.t. working with FOSS developers-developers-developers.?
What use is a processor design if you don't have a fab that can produce it? In an open source processor world, it would be whoever has the best fabs who makes the most money. Which AFAIK currently is Intel.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
For all of the waste our government has, it would be very nice to see a path for "free" patents in return for an open-source license, or even an immediate payout for a "novel" open-source license. Got a great idea? Patent it for free, get a small check, and someone (or everyone) can start producing it! No lawsuits, proper attribution - really honest companies might even pay royalties voluntarily (The US is too greedy for that, I'm afraid)
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
About 1/2 of my in-state tuition was paid for by royalties from patents. My in-state tuition was only supported by about 30% tax payers. The rest was by the student or money made from research. If you were out-of-state, you had to pay everything yourself, unless from a sister-Uni.
My state Uni was almost entirely supported by tuition and Alumni donations. Federal funding only went directly to departments or groups that qualified, not to the Uni.
Open source is fine for intel. No patents is fine for intel. In terms of software, people still need hardware to run it on.
In terms of hardware to build for the software, intel has a huge fab advantage. Given an equal, level playing field, intel will come out in front in terms of fabrication.
However, if someone was to patent an invention they've funded, well... then they're at a disadvantage.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The US patent office has a little used mechanism to prevent this it is called Statutory Invention Registration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Statutory_Invention_Registration It effectively puts an invention into the public domain and provides a rock solid publication date. It's most common use is to force an invention into the public domain if an inventor feels that they can not get a meaningful patent on it to make sure what you suggest will not happen. It was probably created with academia and government agency in mind who's charter directs them to open source their work.
No words to thank Intel for this OpenSource on Patents Idea. Do the patent, but opensource it.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Kudos to Intel for doing something right (even though it is also in their best interest).
I wish the U.S. government would specify exactly the same condition. Today, taxpayers fund research, but then resulting discoveries are locked behind patents and used to extract more money (sometimes, as with pharmaceuticals, at staggeringly hyperinflated prices) from the people who paid for them.
In my experience, no publicly funded research is never bid out in a reasonable fashion. A lot of people like to talk about how great publicly funded research is, but when you dig into who gets to use the research and how the technology is actually applied in the private sector, it's pretty much always a huge disappointment.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I'm aware of larrabee, however intel choose not to invest the money in the rasterising 3d acceleration business that would give them the top graphics card performance, simply because they do not see it as their core business, a core business that they like as it is thankyouverymuch.