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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.
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.
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"
A lot of research can be very high quality and still not a good target for a patent (or patentable at all). Patents really cover the industrial application resulting from, often, many layers of increasingly abstract or obscure research results.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.