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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."
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.
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.
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.
This is so wrong I have to ask, are you mentally challenged? First to file does not change rules about publication or who can claim inventions. It only changes the rules covering what happens when two groups attempt to patent the same thing at nearly the same time.
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"?
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.
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.