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The Compulsive Patent Hoarding Disorder (thehindu.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: It takes money to make money. CSIR-Tech, the commercialisation arm of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), realised this the hard way when it had to shut down its operations for lack of funds. CSIR has filed more than 13,000 patents -- 4,500 in India and 8,800 abroad -- at a cost of $7.6 million over the last three years. Across years, that's a lot of taxpayers' money, which in turn means that the closing of CSIR-Tech is a tacit admission that its work has been an expensive mistake -- a mistake that we tax-paying citizens have paid for. Recently, CSIR's Director-General Girish Sahni claimed that most of CSIR's patents were "bio-data patents", filed solely to enhance the value of a scientist's resume and that the extensive expenditure of public funds spent in filing and maintaining patents was unviable. CSIR claims to have licensed a percentage of its patents, but has so far failed to show any revenue earned from the licences. This compulsive hoarding of patents has come at a huge cost. If CSIR-Tech was privately run, it would have been shut down long ago. Acquiring Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) comes out of our blind adherence to the idea of patenting as an index of innovation. The private sector commercializes patents through the licensing of technology and the sale of patented products to recover the money spent in R&D. But when the funds for R&D come from public sources, mimicking the private sector may not be the best option.
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Hello,
I am wondering if this has more to do with the quality of the research being done, as opposed to the patent process itself. While India's CSIR-Tech may have failed, Australia's equivalent entity, CSIRO, seems to have done quite well for Australian taxpayers, such as generating income on from Wi-Fi (some essential component of 802.11n, as I recall).
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
By which I mean, someone wants to claim ownership of their creation for the sole purpose of denying others the ability to patent it.
If there is such a thing, that patenting process ought to be government subsidized and possibly given processing priority.
I guess now we know where the /. moderators live.
If it is just a drain on the Aussie taxpayer - some sort of open ended research organization to plow endless funds into - shut it down and spend the money on something useful like Aboriginal health.
Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) managed to patent-troll the world with their Wi-Fi patent. Maybe India should have asked them for help, or maybe it's better they didn't.
This summary reads as if written by an "objectivist" patent troll.
India has a penchant for entering just about every international pissing contest out there. Since patent filing is hot in developed countries, India has to file lots of patents. In the meantime, however, more than 600 million Indian citizens still have no access to electricity, running water and sewage. Rest assured though that India is up there with the big boys in all the pissing contests.
What country is this where wasting $7.9 million over 3 years of taxpayers money is an issue at all? In the US we waste that every 3 minutes.
making the whole neighborhood look bad.
The private sector commercializes patents through the licensing of technology and the sale of patented products to recover the money spent in R&D. But when the funds for R&D come from public sources, mimicking the private sector may not be the best option.
There's absolutely no reason why the public sector can't mimick the private sector; go to any big university city in the developed world and check out all the spin-offs and joint venture companies founded on patents and research out of those publicly-funded universities, it definitely pays. I hate to fall back on stereotypes, but this being India we're talking about, I'm going to guess that the real problem here is corruption and mismanagement, not any fundamental inability of the public sector to monetize patents.
spend the money on something useful like Aboriginal health.
...or Drop Bear containment!
Just to be absolutely clear, the article is talking about an Indian organisation called CSIR, while you're talking about an Australian organisation called CSIRO. Those organisations may perform similar roles in their respective countries, so it's possible that you're not actually as confused as it at first appears, but I'd like some clarification on that, Bruce.
Why not let all citizens use them for free, it's better then hoping someone wants to license it and negotiating fees, just say take it.
Of course license to people in foreign countries
If CSIR-Tech was privately run, it would have been shut down long ago.
HA HA! Good one. If CSIR-Tech were privately run, as soon as quarterly earnings showed a decline they would start suing anyone and everyone remotely connected to their patents. As soon as this was shown to more profitable than whatever those scientists had been doing they'd announce a "restructuring" and fire most of them, replacing them with patent lawyers.
... man, ha. ::wipes away tear::
Heh heh, "shut down"
Would it change your opinion to find out that this is about the CSIR in India, not CSIRO in Australia?
Patents have become another "must-have" item in a scientists resume. It presumably shows you're able to create practical applications from otherwise abstract research results.
In practice, of course, you can patent pretty much anything you want if you put your mind to it, and the vast majority of granted patents are never implemented in an actual product and never make any money at all. So researchers just jump through another set of hoops to pad their CV with, usually, a completely worthless patent or two.
The researcher is happy since they got another item on their career-critical CV. The university is happy since granted patents counts toward university rankings. The granting agencies are happy since it shows their research grants are producing tangible results. Too bad the actual end result - the patent - is utterly worthless.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I think someone owes some back taxes. I bet they didn't claim the value of the patents.
"It takes money to make money." is not true because part of the profit can't be used to travel back in time to the point where the first amount of money was spent in order to declare money made. Money can't be used to effect time travel.
This should be an STD, not a disorder. I think Microsoft caught something similar this when screwing too many people over.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Longer version: http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I think we can blame the beer, though to be fair, the summary really should have mentioned what country they were talking about. After all, it's not America.
This is the thorn in all bureaucracies: Governments big and small have a guaranteed income, allowing it to place policies, like a 'war' on drugs, or security theatre, over effectiveness or efficiency. All too often, that demand for guaranteed results benefits a relatively small private industry (eg. Hollywood), or destroys value already created (eg. Berkeley on-line lessons).
Why is it *always* necessary to compare a government agency to how an equivalent private agency would run?
It's really that unbelievably difficult to understand that private business and public services operate in wildly different ways, with wildly different purposes and goals?
Do people have *any* idea how much things would cost if all government services were for profit? Either virtually every government run service would have to shut down, or be priced to the point where no one but the wealthy would be able to afford them.
If you want to argue that CSIR isn't fulfilling it's mission, that's fine. Argue away. But to argue that CSIR should be shut down because it isn't make a profit? That's just so mindbogglingly insane that it's not even wrong.
Why not apply the same criteria to every other government service? DMV? Libraries? Public schools? Roads? Emergency Services? Basic Utilities like water and sanitation? They should all be profitable or shut down! Hell, disband government entirely and make *everything* a for-profit company. You need clean water? Then you won't mind paying $10/gallon for it cause some Martin Shkreli clone wants to line his pockets.
Suddenly all you people who bitch about taxes being theft will be singing a wildly different tune. Assuming you can sing at all because you will be left financially destitute just trying to not die.
well done, not like IPR was already an intellectual property acronym that was meaningful.