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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?
In that scenario, the university publishes the idea and it becomes prior art.
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 the university publishes their discoveries, there would be demonstrable prior art.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I like bashing faceless mega corporations as much as the next guy, but this seems to be ... a benign act.
With first to file you still cannot patent anything that has already been published, so as long as the university publishes instead of sitting on the invention then nobody else can come along and file for a patent.
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
For one, they are the only major GPU maker that actually releases open source drivers.
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If that turns out to be the case, then all the better for Intel to fund it instead of the taxpayers.
It doesn't matter if you're first to file if someone publishes the invention in the public domain before you file.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.
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...
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.
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For two, if you want them to OSS their internal research, you can pay for it.
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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.
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?
As others have commented, first to file doesn't apply if the research has been made public. Since universities rely on publish or perish, the most likely scenario is that anything produced through Intel funding will be considered prior art when an outside party then tries to patent it. Assuming that the software is GPL'd, then it must include the GPL required headers, etc. So, if somebody does try to usurp it, then the university can sue them for license violations.
What Intel is proposing is how Universities used to operate prior to the 1980s. Somebody did research, presented a paper at a conference, others picked it up and expanded on that research and then presented at another conference, etc., etc. There were no patents and information flowed relatively freely and knowledge expanded. That is how the university system was designed to work.
Come the 1980s and tax law changes, universities focused more on monetarizing their research to fund other things (not necessarily a bad thing), but the way it played out was that the patents were then sold to other companies who then used them to build war chests and limit competition.
Intel is every bit in its right to insist that if you want to use their money for research, these are the stipulations. If a university doesn't like having to make the fruits of the research public and available to all, they are free to use the money from somebody else.
It is interesting to note that the biggest advances in science, at least in the US, came under systems in which the information was freely shared. Since keeping research private and seeking patents, the US has gone from being a leader int he scientific community to a follower. But at least somebody made a bunch of money of them.
Its even easier than that. A patent is granted to the inventor. You can't take another persons invention to the patent office.
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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Reading your post, I'm fairly certain you have no idea how business works.
he difference is they control what their employees do, but not what the kids do. What if the kids in the lab create something "naughty" that gets them sued
The other difference is, they aren't responsible for what the kids do ... because they don't control them. I'm not responsible for what your kids do, even if I give you $50 and you give it to them to buy a gun and shoot people. What world do you live in where someone is responsible for your actions but have no control what so ever over your actions?
I'm more worried about the kids creating "Napster 2012" or equivalent. Intel wants / needs no part of that, thats for sure.
Do you have any idea how much money was made by smart people off of Napster? The only guy who gets stuffed is the last guy holding onto it. Plenty of people made a fortune in profit directly off Napster, ignoring Fanning completely.
if the kids invented something that Intel would own that would make them vaguely in violation of some kind of anti-trust law.
You have absolutely no idea what anti-trust means. Monopoly laws are to punish bad behavior, not being good at what you do.
In summary, no profit off the kids makes the odds of financial loss from the kids somewhat lower.
Name one instance where someone has been sued (and actually lost) because they contributed open ended grants to someone else which resulted in something bad happening. The only financial loss for Intel is the money they are giving in grants for research and potential losses if someone patents something then uses it against intel.
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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.
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.