[HN Gopher] Universities have formed a company that looks a lot ...
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Universities have formed a company that looks a lot like a patent
troll
Author : polm23
Score : 757 points
Date : 2021-06-15 03:06 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| arpa wrote:
| To be fair, academia everywhere is exploitative and toxic to its
| members, with exceptions, perhaps, of top level administrative
| positions - see [0]. So this kind of exploitative and toxic
| behavior does not surprise one bit. Who wants to bet that these
| patents will be created by students for negative pay?
|
| [0] https://alexandreafonso.me/2013/11/21/how-academia-
| resembles...
| dgb23 wrote:
| I've worked as an assistant while studying a few years ago.
| Reasonable pay, interesting work, and a social environment.
| biztos wrote:
| > academia everywhere is exploitative and toxic
|
| Do you mean "everywhere" in the USA, or _everywhere?_
|
| I have noticed quite different levels and types of dysfunction
| in different countries, and again between public/private in the
| US, but then it's been a long time since I had first-hand
| knowledge so I could be underestimating the similarities.
|
| At least in some countries the students aren't paying tuition
| for the privilege.
| [deleted]
| jltsiren wrote:
| The academia is institutionally far more diverse than people
| think. Whatever you may believe about the academia, there is
| always a country / university / field where things are
| different.
|
| I'm not sure if the academia is actually more toxic or
| exploitative than the average workplace. The bigger issue is
| that jobs are geographically scarce. There is usually only one
| university in the town, and if you don't like it, it's hard to
| find a new job without relocating. As a consequence, many
| people feel trapped in a job they don't like.
| musicale wrote:
| As I understand it, it is typical for universities to claim
| ownership of all graduate student inventions.
|
| Faculty can sometimes get a decent cut of royalties, and can
| also benefit twice if they found a company that uses the
| patents.
| gspr wrote:
| > As I understand it, it is typical for universities to claim
| ownership of all graduate student inventions.
|
| I'm highly opposed to a lot of what's described in this
| thread, and to the tearing down of academia in general. But I
| don't think it's wholly insane that universities own grad
| student inventions in all cases. Where I was a grad student,
| for example, we were _regular employees_ on a fixed-term
| contract. Sure, we weren 't paid stellarly well, but quite
| decently (maybe 20% below the average for an industry job).
| At that point I don't think it's weird that the inellectual
| property we produced (in my case just code that didn't earn
| them a dime) was theirs.
| mjevans wrote:
| This is probably against some WTO or government law; but
| for a moment set that aside and consider.
|
| What if these universities were some kind of public benefit
| think tank or lab that happened to also be a university? If
| instead of a profit to general investors any profits had to
| either be re-invested in research projects or go into the
| general fund of the national government they operate
| beneath? With the additional requirement that any gained
| research become the public domain? Possibly with some of
| the more dangerous stuff being classified but filed under
| seal as prior art?
|
| PS: Please pay ABOVE prevailing wage to attract the best
| talent to the advancement of technology.
| gspr wrote:
| The idea your proposing sounds great. I'm all for.
|
| > PS: Please pay ABOVE prevailing wage to attract the
| best talent to the advancement of technology.
|
| I don't think that's necessary at all. It seems to me
| that pay is almost never the reason people quit academic
| research careers. It's the uncertainty, the short
| contracts, and the necessity of brutal hours in the early
| career stages. Sure, terrible conditions like these can
| in some sense be offset by pay, but I suspect everyone is
| better off if that isn't the mechanism used.
| versteegen wrote:
| At my university (in NZ), it seems you owned the IP (even if
| you were on a scholarship awarded by the university itself)
| unless you were contributing to a university- or industry-led
| project where there was some other agreement covering IP
| ownership. However the university across the road apparently
| were more aggressive, taking ownership of a student's IP
| whenever they take part in a "University Project group" or
| used significant university resources.
|
| Of course, if the IP was jointly created with anyone (e.g.
| supervisors) employed by the university (pretty likely!), the
| university would have a fractional ownership share.
|
| Edit: corrected & expanded
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| If it quacks...
| samaman wrote:
| THIS this is so accurate, and the patenting offices are so
| bureaucratic too! Worked in one at a UC and if I worked past 5pm
| or came in early, people thought I was crazy. I remember I set up
| a linkedin tracker one week and people thought I was so fast
| moving. Meanwhile, the part of the office that actually helped
| startups had 1/5th the people and kept scaring away students who
| actually needed help because the students kept thinking the
| office would claim their idea as university property and make
| them pay for the rights to their own startups. This is why the UC
| is not the as good as Waterloo or other universities for
| startups, and its only getting worse as more programs have usage
| fees now (looking at you Skydeck). Also, did I mention that the
| UC gave $250m to Vivek Ranadive, owner of Sac Kings, to run a VC
| firm, Bow Capital, to invest in UC founders, and that company is
| now instead launching a SPAC to take Wework public? Yeah the UC
| startup ecosystem is kinda trash....
| Black101 wrote:
| Nice lesson to their students...
| makomk wrote:
| Wouldn't be the first time universities have acted like patent
| trolls. For example, you know the filament-style LED lightbulbs
| that are really popular these days? The University of California
| has been going after a bunch of retailers with patent lawsuits
| for selling them, complete with PR push about how it was their
| invention that had been stolen from them. I looked at what they'd
| actually invented and patented at the time, and it was nothing
| like those filament LED lightbulbs - it was a old-fashioned
| resin-dome LED that replaced the metal anvil the die is usually
| mounted on with a TIR reflector, supposedly to improve
| efficiency. This was completely impractical, pointless and had no
| market value - the metal anvil is really useful both as
| mechanical support and a heatsink, you'd almost certainly lose
| any possible efficiency gain that resulted from capturing more of
| the rear light output due to higher temperatures. However, they'd
| worded their patent claims in such a broad way that they could
| cover nearly anything, and the university used this to file for
| patents that were actually similar to the LED filaments after
| they'd already been invented by someone else and put on the
| market but backdated in validity to their original patent.
|
| This isn't just a software-related problem.
| rdudekul wrote:
| I find Patents evil the same way hardcore racism is.
| Exploitation and profiteering are their motivations under the
| guise of fear and protection.
|
| From all of my work experience, it is finding product-market-
| fit that is harder than filing a bunch of patents or better yet
| buying them up in bulk. Yet startups can be hugely liable to
| patent trolls.
|
| Did not realize how much the Universities themselves are
| perpetuating this problem.
| ctf1er wrote:
| awah wahh
| runeks wrote:
| > A 2013 Brookings Institute study showed that 84% of
| universities didn't make enough money from their patents to cover
| the related legal costs and the staffing of their tech transfer
| office.
|
| You don't have to make money from patents for them to make sense.
| They can work as an insurance against patent suits.
|
| As I understand it, this is the reason many large corporations
| file so many patents: if they get sued, they hope that the other
| party has violated a patent of theirs, and they can reach a
| setttlement.
| new299 wrote:
| Has anyone ever taken action against a university for patent
| infringement? Seems very unlikely.
| 8note wrote:
| That mostly makes it seem like the whole thing is useless.
|
| Everyone has patents on everything, so there's always a
| settlement to be had.
|
| You could do away with all the paperwork by abolishing the
| patents
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I think US universities have diverged from their original
| purpose. They're more obsessed with money than actual education.
| tsjq wrote:
| MBAs have ventured into this space too. beancounting, cost-
| center vs profit-center, optimising for revenues, more PR, & so
| on .
| williesleg wrote:
| Universities are so smart! They teach communism so well and love
| china!
| silexia wrote:
| Utterly horrifying.
|
| The entire patent system should be dismantled as it is anti-
| competitive and a huge block to legitimate innovation and
| creativity. Patents raise prices and reduce quality on almost
| every good and service that is not just a commodity.
|
| But to have the government (most universities take tons of
| government money) start to take ownership of ideas and block
| private individuals and companies from using those ideas is
| Orwellian. A true nightmare.
|
| Anything that touches public money should be completely open and
| free for anyone to use.
| [deleted]
| gigatexal wrote:
| Instead of a patent company wouldn't these universities be better
| served to work as sort of early stage VCs. The university acts as
| a way to train engineers and then in partnership perhaps with
| their professors they solve real world problems. To market their
| solutions these engineers partner with the university to use its
| endowment to fund the startups?
|
| The university of Michigan I think already does this.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> As many as 95% of university patents do not get licensed at
| all.
|
| Probably because 95 percent of them are worthless, as is the case
| with patents granted to companies. The simple solution is to stop
| offering incentives for simply getting patents. The obvious thing
| to do is offer revenue sharing from the patent licensing, but
| people at the top generally don't want to pay that much to a
| (even academic) peon for their innovations. But it's valid - make
| the incentive relate to the quality of the patent and you'll get
| better quality.
| ElViajero wrote:
| I understand that there is a historical expectations that
| Universities should provide education and be a role model for
| society. But, as far as I know, in the USA universities are just
| another business.
|
| The USA should stop being surprised each time that a company
| rises prices of a live-saving treatment or starts a patent troll
| company. Some of this kind of problems are exclusively a USA
| problem and do not exist in other developed parts of the world.
|
| Why is that?
|
| My 2 cents are that you need is to create rules for a fair game.
| As a society you should regulate how companies behave, what is
| permitted and what is not. You elect your government make it work
| for you. It is not always easy, as there are many interests, but
| it is possible.
|
| For the USA citizens that may read this, you know better your
| country. What is your opinion?
| csa wrote:
| > For the USA citizens that may read this, you know better your
| country. What is your opinion?
|
| I left academia because it was clear to me that professors were
| rapidly becoming commoditized by the administrators.
|
| First, it was the students (both grad and undergrad), then the
| adjunct faculty, and then the tenure track/tenured faculty.
|
| I don't know for sure (esp. about the early years), but it
| seemed to me like this trend started in the 80s, gathered steam
| and the 90s, and hit its stride in the 00s.
|
| IMHO, this is the byproduct of the white collarization
| (administrationization) of as much of US society as possible,
| especially notable in education and medicine (where the doctors
| have been commoditized by the admins). I personally think that
| so much of this is make-work for a society that should be
| moving towards post-work, but US society has culturally
| ingrained work ethic guilt that makes equality and leisure
| things that are not aggressively sought after consistently
| throughout society. The end result is administrators who
| essentially make work for each other while providing much less
| societal value than is justified by their cost while actively
| devaluing the "real" work done by those around them.
|
| This patent stuff is just a continuation of the power grab of
| the university administrators.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think you have a very good point. I can also see this
| through my career. Everytime there is some restructuring more
| power ends up in the hand of administrators. In particular
| you can see that systems are generally build to reduce
| administration workload (because they work regular 9-5) at
| the cost of more work for academics (because their work hours
| are not counted) .
|
| I am not sure you're correct about the cause though. My
| theory is it's a side effect of trying to have quantifiable
| outcomes everywhere, which essentially requires more admin.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >but US society has culturally ingrained work ethic guilt
| that makes equality and leisure things that are not
| aggressively sought after consistently throughout society.
|
| Here's a picture of that thing:
| https://i.imgur.com/GYlzOhQ.jpg
|
| Credit: Android Jones
|
| America's biggest problem are the Too Big to Fail(tm) + Too
| Big To Prosecute(tm) banks and their Fed. By controlling the
| currency supply, and through it the economy, they control the
| country. It's ultimately behind every systemic economic
| problem people face. It's designed that way as what amounts
| to a byzantine pyramid scheme.
|
| When they fucked up and crashed the economy, who got bailed
| out? The citizens and taxpayers or the country's real owners?
| biztos wrote:
| > The end result is administrators who essentially make work
| for each other while providing much less societal value than
| is justified by their cost while actively devaluing the
| "real" work done by those around them.
|
| I wonder if this is inevitable -- the administrative staff's
| purpose is administration and it wants to do more of it -- or
| if there's a way to prevent that at the institutional level.
|
| One thing would be giving irrevocable rights and powers to
| professors at public universities, a lot of countries do that
| but I'm not sure how well it works against
| "administrationization."
|
| It does seem like putting the researchers in charge might
| help starve the cancerous administrative class, but maybe you
| have to start your own university in order to implement this?
| lmm wrote:
| > I wonder if this is inevitable -- the administrative
| staff's purpose is administration and it wants to do more
| of it -- or if there's a way to prevent that at the
| institutional level.
|
| The iron law of bureaucracy seems to apply. Maybe the only
| option is to tear down institutions every so often and
| replace them with new ones.
|
| > One thing would be giving irrevocable rights and powers
| to professors at public universities, a lot of countries do
| that but I'm not sure how well it works against
| "administrationization."
|
| Maybe it works for a while, but you only have to look at
| the steady erosion of tenure in UK universities to see how
| this fails. In the US there seems to be a more subtle
| approach of pushing tenure dates later and later in the
| career path, so that gradually more and more of what were
| once professors are now adjuncts and grad students.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Cheers for Ralph Miliband, the smart Marxist:
| http://on.ft.com/1hCbCiC. Pre managerialism, he predicted its
| rise.
|
| Also Burnham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visible_Hand
| zucker42 wrote:
| Our political system is dysfunctional. So even if some people
| realize problems with the rules, corporations and other
| entities will lobby so as to continue profiteering. In
| addition, US culture really values making money and forming
| profitable businesses, and people have been conditioned to view
| any attack on businesses as an attack on the "free market"
| (even though, e.g., patents are the opposite of free). So, if
| you talk about, for example, reforming patents, people talk
| about how you are ending innovative (read profitable)
| businesses.
| Matthias1 wrote:
| > USA universities are just another business
|
| The vast majority of US colleges accept government grants and
| don't pay taxes. So it is reasonable to hold them to a higher
| standard than a normal business.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> So it is reasonable to hold them to a higher standard than
| a normal business._
|
| One important practical difference is that Academia doesn't
| pay its individual contributors even close to market rate.
|
| When I started my PhD, I had seven job offers. Five were PhD
| programs, and the pay ranged from $25K to $40K or so (but the
| $25K option paid better than the $40K option because of CoL).
| The other two were in finance and tech, and paid $200K and
| $150K respectively.
|
| I wouldn't ever have taken a PhD job if I didn't own the IP I
| generated.
| [deleted]
| breck wrote:
| Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 was a mistake.
|
| Intellectual Slavery laws are bad, and are disastrous as we
| move further into the Information Age and we need to repeal
| them http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-
| amendmen...
| afiori wrote:
| At least in the case of drug markets it is not necessarily a
| matter of too much or little regulation but rather a matter of
| bad vs good regulations:
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...
|
| In the famous case of epipens it is true that a complete
| absence of price control is a problem, but the price spike was
| also made possible by the de facto epipens manifacturing
| monopoly granted by the FDA.
|
| In this case there are heavy regulation regarding entering a
| market AND few regulations inside the market.
|
| EDIT: changed insulin to epipens to match the article
| muskox2 wrote:
| The difference is that in many cases, universities are a
| business that's also subsidized by the government, which makes
| it even easier for them to engage in monopolistic behavior.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| 1. Citizens United.
|
| 2. A populace that is so beaten down, and slaves to the
| wealthy/corporations, they can't afford to effectively rally
| against the system.
|
| 3. A populace that still is under the delusion that the
| American way is the best way. Greed is good. I don't think I
| ever met a young person whom didn't believe they would make it
| big one day, on their own. (The rich kids always leave out
| dad's empathic help received up into their 30's when giving
| that "Horatio Algiers" speech. The only people I see making the
| American dream are from wealthy families? (Gavin Neusome, whom
| I really like, and went to school with, would probally be
| homeless, or a drug addict if not for that caring, wealthy
| family. He had some big stumbling blocks family took care of
| growing up. I know members of his family. I know how much help
| he got while finding his calling in his 20's to 30's. Now he's
| living the American dream. Again--he's a good guy, and he knows
| what it's like to have problems. I think that why he's a
| practical liberal politician?)
|
| 4. Spirituality, morality, and ethics are something that used
| to be admired, now it's just for suckers.
|
| 5. I am kinda proud of our legal system some months? I imagine
| that will slowly change over the years though. The Senate has
| filled 1 Federal Judge seat since Biden took office. Under
| Trump, McConnel was to ordered to fill vacant seats like a
| drive though at an In and Out Burger, after a cannabis rally.
|
| 6. America used to be better, and most Americans still believe
| it's a great country. (I would happily move to a Scandinavian,
| or certain European countries if I was younger. Hell--Canada,
| and Australia look ok? Any country that truly helps it's poor
| is fine with me.)
| 8note wrote:
| How does he both know what's it's like to have problems, and
| have had his parents pay his way out of all his problems?
| bushbaba wrote:
| The joke goes in Canada they apologize in America they sue.
|
| The issue is the patent system itself. It's needs to be
| reformed as right now it's very much an arms race for defense
| and exploitation.
|
| I kind of like china's approach of lax ip enforcement. Goes a
| long way to encourage R&D.
|
| Or just make parents enforceable for 5-10 years total. The
| current 20+ years is too longs these days given the recent
| increased pace of innovation.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Ideally there should be more nuance in patent durations. 20
| years for a new steam turbine design seems entirely
| reasonable. 20 years for a new electronic gadget like an
| improved LED seems too long.
|
| But any way to get different patent durations would probably
| be gamed and/or unfair, so maybe just reducing the patent
| duration to 10 years is the best approach.
| infogulch wrote:
| The incentives created by our current instantiation of IP law has
| broken the connection between competence and success, and this
| fact is slowly eating our culture from the inside out as a
| result.
|
| The division of the bounty of invention (or, attribution of
| credit) between nation, organization, and individual is
| fundamental and will never be fully "solved" -- only continuously
| negotiated -- but the current tilt is doing unsustainable damage
| to our society. The sudden appearance of Information Technologies
| and their unprecedented scalability has changed the game in a
| profound way, enabling a new class of exploitative monopolistic
| behavior caused by the failure to reward competence in alignment
| with its addition of value over time. This is the biggest problem
| facing humanity this century.
| brokencode wrote:
| Higher education in this country (and probably others too) is
| unbelievably messed up. Everybody I know or have heard of going
| to grad school has had to work brutal hours for years on end.
| That is a recipe for burnout, not academic advancement.
| Universities today are basically sweatshops for highly educated
| people.
|
| Meanwhile endowments continue to swell, and tuition soars.
| Somebody is winning in all this, and it isn't the students or the
| faculty.
| dlivingston wrote:
| The amount of depression, suicidal ideation, poor health, and
| excessive stress that doctoral candidates go through is
| staggering. I was very, very close to accepting a doctorate
| program and was ultimately talked out of it by several PhD
| friends.
|
| 4-7 years earning ~$30,000 under the intense pressures of the
| academy to learn, publish, conference hop, and teach don't
| sound fun, esp. when a MSc program is two years and can get you
| a quite satisfying career (in engineering and science).
| Woodi wrote:
| Looks US patent system is guilty of universities stupidization is
| US...
|
| So, let's bring some history at least as I learned it.
| Photography was invented and in UK patented. But it wasn't
| patented in France so it was developed more - not stagnating
| (like in UK). And that nicely explains why "early masters" in
| photography are from France - development, development,
| development.
|
| But in post WW2 US NSA was created (1957?) and all cryptography
| science was, at least, enforced to be self-censored. Looks like
| later self-censoreship was extendet for rest of the science - I
| bet in the name of US strategic adventage... That started killing
| science in US.
|
| On top of that you have culture of nation-wide gread in winner-
| takes-all-and-noone-helps-him clothes. I would call it Albion 2.0
| greed... Patent everything including not-realy inventions ! Greed
| is strong in US.
|
| And that makes US literaly equivalent of ancient Egiptian priests
| that know how science of sun eclipses work but do not share and
| exploit it for own gain. And that makes further science
| development imposible (in US).
|
| There is one more thing: economy/management/etc graduates are
| kind of sociopaths-by-education. Years of brainwashing make them
| to extract cash from everything for themselves. Not company or
| enterprise! R&D or long term projects ? No way ! Bonus over all !
| And thay are good at that economy/management work but it's like
| kids playing in someone workshop - them have _no clue_ what 's
| going on and what's possibly can be achieved.
|
| Just look and HN links... Anything new and interesting (in
| science) comes from Europe, Japan, Australia, Brasil ! And from
| US comes only details for already discloused ideas and fields.
| That is my impression and I'm sure statistic could [dis]prove it.
| frockington1 wrote:
| How are all of those countries so far behind economically if
| they are so much more efficient than the US? If Brazil is one
| of the epicenters of science, what is going on that is causing
| it to be plagued by violence and gang wars?
| da39a3ee wrote:
| > When taxpayers fund research, the fruits of the research should
| be available for all.
|
| How is this statement consistent with academics starting start-
| ups?
| vmception wrote:
| Without commenting on the patent system it is still easy to
| conclude that Universities shouldnt be in this business
|
| It should be easy to legislate their participation in non
| practicing entity patent litigation
| kemitchell wrote:
| Universities are all non-practicing in the sense they don't
| commercialize inventions directly. If they enforce a patent,
| it's as a non-practicing entity. If they couldn't enforce, who
| would license?
| vmception wrote:
| Institutions of higher learning have done their job by filing
| and disclosing the invention and sharing it for free
| kemitchell wrote:
| Apparently that's not how Congress felt when they passed
| Bayh-Dole.
| vmception wrote:
| Yeah and if I talk about it enough theyll pass a new law
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| TIL Bayh-Dole
|
| And after 30 seconds of reading I already feel it should
| be repealed as disadvantages the citizens by giving
| companies rights to something we paid for.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| How is it that you're the only one mentioning Bayh-Dole?
| That was the original sin of all this. The rest is
| inevitable.
| cycomanic wrote:
| If one accepts the premise of the patent system (and I don't
| necessarily), i.e. that it somehow is a way to reward innovation,
| then I find this discussion about patent trolls contradictory.
|
| Why should only companies who make something benefit from the
| patent system? Somehow it's expected that the universities (and
| small innovators who can't afford lawyers to fight big guys
| violating a patent) generate free knowledge for companies. It's
| quite disappointing that the eff is propagating this view.
|
| It reminds me a lot to what is happening in OSS, where big
| corporations and startups are making billions of software build
| by volunteers that burn out maintaining said software while
| working another day job. The same companies then pad themselves
| on the back if they sponsor some project with a couple of
| thousand dollars a year for supporting open source.
| akomtu wrote:
| One shouldn't accept this premise in a country that runs on
| pure refined greed. From that greedy cynical perspective, I'd
| think about patents this way. Say you have a voice you use to
| say things. I'm, a rich greedy racoon, thinking "hm.. how can I
| own his voice so anything he says would pay me a royalty?" And
| I come up with a clever plan: make a law that allows anyone to
| wrap their voice into a "patent" that can be sold or rented
| like a property. The law is sold as a way to empower good
| voices and reduce inequality. Then, I manufacture a situation
| where people in need have to sell their voices to buy food. Now
| I'm a landlord, I mean voicelord, who "owns" voices. Very legal
| and very cool. Iirc, this is how Edison got to "own" Tesla's
| inventions.
| swiley wrote:
| The original idea was that it rewards sharing innovation.
| You're supposed to publish in detail the way your invention
| works and in return get legally protected exclusive rights to
| it for a decade or so.
|
| I'm surprised software patents don't require source code to be
| published, that would fit with the spirit of the thing.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> The original idea was that it rewards sharing innovation.
| You 're supposed to publish in detail the way your invention
| works and in return get legally protected exclusive rights to
| it for a decade or so._
|
| Setting everything else aside, academia is the _one place_
| where patent issuance is matched with a non-legalese
| description of the invention. Nearly all software patents in
| academic CS are matched by a series of academic articles,
| which aren 't always super well-written, but are almost
| always infinitely better than the inscrutable JD-drafted
| legalese found in patent applications.
|
| It's not perfect, but academia (and industrial labs that
| function similarly to academia) get _much closer_ to the
| spirit of "sharing how your invention works" than patents
| that are issued to basically any other type of institution.
|
| _> I 'm surprised software patents don't require source code
| to be published, that would fit with the spirit of the
| thing._
|
| I think this view comes from a pretty common misunderstanding
| of patent law. You don't need to actually build a thing to
| get a patent. There are tons of patents for e.g. power-plant
| components that AFAIK have never actually been built. You
| don't need to write a single line of code to get a software
| patent.
| nceqs3 wrote:
| Anybody who receives public funding should be forced to license
| their patents under FRAND terms.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Dare I mention this on HN? Here it goes.
|
| These universities listed legal schools have been converted into
| communism/socialism brainwashing centers. I started doing
| personal research during the (Gasp) trump administration due to
| the how obvious it became the media was completely manipulated by
| someone.
|
| I found in my researching that nearly every misinformation
| campaign and general SJW madness had ties back to the exact
| universities listed in this article. Either through law
| professors employees at uni or from students that graduated from
| those universities.
|
| Here come the downvotes, but do some research for yourself and
| see that something is going on.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without downvote-baiting,
| which is explicitly against the site guidelines.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| corentin88 wrote:
| > It's good news when universities share technology with the
| private sector, and when startup companies get formed based on
| university research.
|
| It's public money that is going to feed private individuals. With
| no ROI/commission. I don't feel like it's good news.
| dgb23 wrote:
| It's good news if they pay taxes, lobby for public research and
| education, don't abuse their power to exploit workers and
| manipulate customers.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Universities are centers for teaching, research, and community.
| But that broader social mission is exactly why universities
| shouldn't go off and form a patent-holding company that is
| designed to operate similarly to a patent troll.
|
| The problem is that mission requires money. Lots of money.
| Researchers need pay (and many already earn next to nothing).
| Researchers need equipment. I get why this is disquieting, but it
| also has hints of the idea that charities should be run with the
| cheapest people available, even in critical executive positions.
|
| As a society we have decided that we don't really want to fund
| that mission all that well, so this is what they come up with.
| And if they abide by the gentleman's agreement to not go after
| small businesses, the other harm should be minimized.
|
| I am not sure that I agree with it but the money would at least
| likely go back into academia so I am not a visceral no.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> the money would at least likely go back into academia so I
| am not a visceral no.
|
| I'm not sure how involved/aware of US universities you've been
| in the past 20+ years but this just isn't true. Tuition costs
| have skyrocketed because when you can't ever get away from
| student debts it turns out there's lots of people willing to
| lend you unlimited funds.
|
| Endowments at the majority of the universities listed here have
| grown enormously in the past several decades, and have unicorn
| returns in the past few years.
|
| And yet the amount of money going into research and pedagody
| hasn't really grown at all. Why? it's all going to
| adminstrative overhead. Just like the article states here, most
| schools can't even cover the cost of their technology transfer
| and licensing overhead (more administration) so they're going
| to squeeze those who can't lawyer up vs. actually provide
| valuable IP.
|
| These are not charities regardless of their taxable status. The
| pay of top administrators at Harvard is actually determined by
| the Harvard Corporation, and in addition to incredible benefits
| and sweet lifetime deals they're all making well over $500K a
| year in salary. HMC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard is
| even more ridiculous, with the top 5 bureaucrats all earning
| between 4.5 and 6 MILLION dollars a year in salary. This has
| nothing to do with research and teaching.
| [deleted]
| closeparen wrote:
| If I fly 747s full of sick orphans from Africa to western
| hospitals, will you point to the size of my jet fuel and
| aircraft maintenance bills to claim I'm not really a charity?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| This comment is why I mentioned the part about charities,
| where we expect people who are on a mission to do it for
| peanuts and a shoestring budget or else they are not
| virtuous.
|
| >I'm not sure how involved/aware of US universities you've
| been in the past 20+ years but this just isn't true. Tuition
| costs have skyrocketed because when you can't ever get away
| from student debts it turns out there's lots of people
| willing to lend you unlimited funds.
|
| I didn't say it was going to tuition, just academia. Academia
| is a lot more than flocks of students in a lecture hall.
|
| > And yet the amount of money going into research and
| pedagody hasn't really grown at all.
|
| It has at Harvard. Would surprise me if it hasn't at the
| other listed schools as well.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/697606/rnd-
| expenditure-h...
|
| > The pay of top administrators at Harvard is actually
| determined by the Harvard Corporation, and in addition to
| incredible benefits and sweet lifetime deals they're all
| making well over $500K a year in salary.
|
| So the leaders of one of the most important academic
| institutions in the world make the same as a middle career
| software engineer at a FAANG? If anything, they seem
| underpaid.
|
| > HMC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard is even more
| ridiculous, with the top 5 bureaucrats all earning between
| 4.5 and 6 MILLION dollars a year in salary.
|
| Because that is what people who manage 40 billion dollars
| earn. We go back to expecting charity people to earn
| fractions of their market rate.
| benrbray wrote:
| > And yet the amount of money going into research and
| pedagody hasn't really grown at all
|
| Indeed. At the big research universities that many people
| aspire to attend, students are paying tens of thousands of
| dollars for the part-time attention of professors who are not
| paid full-time (or even half time, or anything close to it)
| to teach and develop educational materials.
|
| In my experience as a undergrad/grad student and TA, many
| view teaching as an unfortunate requirement of the job, or if
| you're lucky, a fun hobby may or may not have time for that
| week. When a professor gets busy with other things, teaching
| the first sacrifice. Normally they don't hire nearly enough
| TAs to pick up the slack.
|
| It's absolutely crazy. I'm still trying to figure out exactly
| what I paid for those four years, when most of my learning
| came from YouTube lectures and pirated textbook PDFs.
| varnaud wrote:
| Totally agree with you.
|
| Universities need ways to finance themselves.
|
| Tech companies are expert at avoiding paying taxes that could
| be used to pay for the research and this patent trolling could
| be an attempt to get some of that money back using the broken
| rules of the current system.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Universities are making plenty of money. At this point, they're
| hedge funds with schools attached to them. Harvard has a $38
| billion endowment, Yale $29 billion, Princeton $26 billion.
| ksec wrote:
| >Harvard has a $38 _billion_ endowment, Yale $29 _billion_ ,
| Princeton $26 _billion_.
|
| _Holy Mother of God_. I had to fact check this. But it turns
| out Wiki had a whole page [1] on it. Valued at $40.9 billion
| as of 2019. And [2] with the list of US university endowment.
| And on average 10 to 20 times the size of UK universities
| [3].
|
| $40 _BILLION_ US dollars?
|
| And the insane amount of Student Debt? ( portrayed by MSM
| anyway, I didn't look much into it ).
|
| Again there are just lots of thing across the pond lots of
| people from the outside fail to comprehend.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University_endowment
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univer
| sit...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the
| _Un...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > And the insane amount of Student Debt? ( portrayed by MSM
| anyway, I didn't look much into it ).
|
| Presumably not from Harvard students. They have very
| generous financial aid.
|
| https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-
| harvard/affordabi....
| m-ee wrote:
| Keep in mind this is for undergrad only. Stanford is
| fairly generous with aid as well, but for a masters
| degree the only aid is loans unless you get a TA/RA
| position.
| enjoyyourlife wrote:
| Even people with no income still need to pay. See
| https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/8/4/hill-
| elimininate...
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| They don't, if you read the article. The $3,000 is not
| tuition, it's just a requirement to show this much cash
| from work or borrowing for non-tuition expenses, in order
| for Harvard to pay their tuition.
| [deleted]
| emsign wrote:
| Yes, and with the money come higher prices and bigger
| administrative overhead. Because they can get the funds they
| will charge more.
| gravypod wrote:
| It's unfortunate we live in this world. Harvard takes in
| ~2k/year. Each student stays for ~4 years. This means ~10k
| are on campus at any time. Harvard costs ~50k/year.
|
| This means it costs ~500,000,000/year for all of Harvard's
| student bodies.
|
| If Harvard has a 38b endowment they can spend on education
| (they probably don't, probably named buildings) they could
| fund ~76 years of Harvard without charging a dime to
| students.
|
| I wish we lived in the world that was possible.
|
| Also, could we reduce college costs by: mandating college
| credit transfer and allowing students to test out of
| unlimited classes.
|
| I tested out of 3 classes for my degree (the max) just
| using my ~8 years of experience as a programmer. I wasted
| so much time on courses I knew the material for. If I could
| just get a pile of study materials and tests I would have
| saved buckets.
| whakim wrote:
| Ivy+ institutions aren't saddling their students with
| crippling debt (although many others - including
| supposedly affordable "public" universities - are).
| Instead they're simply failing to support students from
| underprivileged/diverse backgrounds once they're in the
| door and can be safely put on a campus brochure.
| andi999 wrote:
| And after 76 years? Harvard was founded in 1636 so if
| they thought like this before they wouldn't have been
| around anymore.
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Harvard has 21,000 students.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University
|
| And very generous financial aid.
|
| https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-
| harvard/affordabi....
| dantheman wrote:
| Harvard isn't the problem; the problem is insane housing
| costs and crazy administrator salaries at other
| institutions.
|
| Harvard et al aren't the problem with student debt.
| gspr wrote:
| The situation is far better in Europe (minus UK) though.
| A lot of the negatives portrayed in this thread are also
| happening here (the esoteric character professors
| becoming fewer and fewer, the paper production labs with
| little passion or spark for the actual research, the
| ever-shrinking time for actual research, etc...), but the
| situation of unaffordable or crippling-debt-inducing
| tuition is still not the norm here.
| jq-r wrote:
| Add to that a large volume of EU funded "projects" which
| are just alternative names for transferring money to
| professors and other administration. So everyone wants to
| work on a EU project, as they will get a lot of money for
| very little (if any) work. The money has to be spent on
| equipment etc, but usually that equipment (IT
| hardware/software, specialised equipment, vehicles,
| whatever) just ends up in the private hands. Then it can
| just be resold to someone else, or bartered for other
| stuff. There is no or very little oversight. Professors
| stopped teaching long ago, they just consider it a
| nuisance while making extremely good money with those
| projects, a lot of free time and high salaries.
| gspr wrote:
| What a load of nonsense! There's plenty wrong with EU
| research funding, but I think you are missing the mark
| completely.
|
| > Add to that a large volume of EU funded "projects"
| which are just alternative names for transferring money
| to professors and other administration
|
| Sure. And then the professors hire PhD students and
| postdocs to do the nitty gritty research, using that
| money. That's pretty much how grant money works - EU or
| no EU. It's far from perfect, but not specific to the EU.
|
| > So everyone wants to work on a EU project, as they will
| get a lot of money for very little (if any) work.
|
| I mean, they're a giant source for research funding, so
| of course. I have never experienced them being "little
| work" though! The oversight seems comparable to that of
| other grants.
|
| > The money has to be spent on equipment etc
|
| That's not true. In my field, almost all of it is spent
| on brains (and their attached life support systems),
| typically in the form of PhD students and postdocs.
|
| > but usually that equipment (IT hardware/software,
| specialised equipment, vehicles, whatever) just ends up
| in the private hands
|
| Citation needed! The universities I've worked at have had
| very strict rules about what happens to things like
| specialized equipment bought on grant money. They
| definitely do not just end up in private hands - it would
| be a scandal where I've worked. (IT hardware sometimes,
| because the depreciation on commodity compute hardware is
| often so significant that it's just not worth the
| hassle).
|
| > Professors stopped teaching long ago, they just
| consider it a nuisance while making extremely good money
| with those projects, a lot of free time and high
| salaries.
|
| The professors I've worked with all had pretty intense
| teaching loads, and essentially zero free time (in fact,
| to paraphrase a recent email from a tenured full
| professor I used to work with: "I finally took a Saturday
| off, so I didn't have time to look at what you wrote yet,
| but I will tomorrow"). The more senior ones have had
| decent salaries indeed, but that's typically after a
| decade of living on scraps, and often (but, granted, not
| always) with skills that industry would reward massively.
| jq-r wrote:
| Not sure why you're so upset about it. Obviously our
| experiences differ and I'm not denying your experience. I
| generalised what is happening over here in Croatia on at
| least two universities that I have experience with
| (directly or indirectly). This stuff is so common that it
| is actually unusual to find the reverse of it.
|
| I'll give you an example as you wanted citation (tell me
| where to get a citation of wasting everyone's money on
| pet projects?). The project was about researching
| movement and feeding of some beach due to movement of the
| sea. One professor and his assistant bought from the
| grant money: scuba diving equipment worth tens of
| thousands of euros, a small boat, video cameras, and
| couple of high end laptops and computers. The actual work
| was almost zero, because it was already done on some
| other beach years previously. And the equipment? In
| private storage, and used privately after. It is always
| the same vague answer when you ask someone "where did you
| get X?": "A project bought it (wink wink)".
|
| A college over here bought a supercomputer some time ago
| for xxxMM, mostly EU funds. Can you guess what does that
| computer spend most of its time on? Idling. Sometimes it
| happens though that they sell processing time to some
| private company. Obviously money well spent. But the
| company who sold it made very solid money.
|
| Couple of years ago they opened a new (public) college
| here which has two times three or four story full glass
| staircases. Do you know how much that costs? Millions of
| EU money. Couldn't they make do with concrete/steel
| staircases? So the moral of the story is, there is a
| whole industry here specialised in extracting EU funds to
| go to private or semi private pockets. On one hand they
| are pretty open about it, and about some other stuff they
| don't like to talk about (at least in public). Newspapers
| have bigger fishes to fry. Not that can anyone can do
| anything anymore because nobody give a flying one.
|
| So the situation is not as rosy as you put it, and
| typically, student wellbeing and education are more
| bullet points on the far end of the priority list.
| Academia is very keen to get and keep their independence.
| Independence from responsibility to the public, but not
| the independence on public's money.
| Google234 wrote:
| On a similar note, I don't get why people want government
| support services. People are making plenty of money! Just
| look at Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This is really disingenous. We're not talking about Puhduka
| State here; the universities involved are literally the
| majolrity of the richest schools in the entire country.
| It's exactly like Gates and Bezos asking for public hand-
| outs, not denying help to many because there are a few rich
| people out there.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Pretty sure that commenter was doing a joke/sarcasm
|
| [EDIT] - I hope*
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Because there is worthwhile work that will never capture
| the interest of Gates or Bezos. For example, testing
| vehicle emissions is never going to be a billionaire
| interest project. Of great societal interest? Absolutely.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/business/vw-wvu-diesel-
| vo...
| mannerheim wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is with this comment. GP was
| saying the universities need a patent troll company because
| they need money. But universities are already making plenty
| of money.
| Qwertious wrote:
| /s? Picking those two are the least representative sample
| possible.
| unishark wrote:
| And what set of universities would form the least
| representative sample possible?
| Qwertious wrote:
| Talking about Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos - they're
| literally some of the richest people on the planet, most
| people don't have anywhere near that much money.
|
| Not sure what you're referring to with the set of
| universities.
| unishark wrote:
| Harvard is the richest university in the country. Yale
| and Princeton are also in the top few.
| mannerheim wrote:
| All three of the universities from my comment are
| participating in the LLC in the article
| unishark wrote:
| I'm just trying to aid someone who was tantalizingly
| close to understanding another poster's joke.
|
| But your comment does read to me like a criticism of
| "universities" as a broad class, not only of certain
| wealthy schools.
| rauhallinen wrote:
| During my time as a research assistant / grad student there was a
| remarkable shift in the atmosphere. It started with massive
| layoffs of research staff, linked to the more general savings of
| our government.
|
| More esoteric professors were replaced with more efficient
| manuscript machines submitting manuscripts to more prestigious
| journals. Soon after the layoffs, the university's innovation and
| commercialization services became extremely active. Recurring
| events at lecture rooms where we were blasted on how our work is
| IP of the university, how the university takes only 50% cut if
| something works, how cool is it to be a researcher who
| commercializes ideas in comparison to being one those dusty farts
| in the science cave studying one protein or butterfly for their
| entire life.
|
| Being a believer and practitioner of open source, I once asked
| how does this all this apply to computational science. Basically
| all algorithms and tools should be passed through them to see if
| they have commercial potential - if no, we can go ahead. Found it
| appalling and interfering with my intellectual freedom, one of
| the many events that made me pursue life outside the academia.
| corobo wrote:
| > Basically all algorithms and tools should be passed through
| them to see if they have commercial potential
|
| That's actually disgusting.. They're supposed to be teaching
| you, not using you for free labour. They got their cut when you
| paid for the course..
| academonia wrote:
| Post-graduate education is kind of a raw deal for people with
| undergrad degrees in computational fields. It might actually
| be worse than "free labor", if you consider the alternative
| of going to work after your first degree.
|
| In the US, you're looking at paying $20-50k/year, and while
| most students will get tuition waivers and small stipends,
| those often disappear if you do any contracting or work on
| the side to supplement your meager income.
|
| Meanwhile, $100-150k is a reasonable starting total comp
| right out of school, especially after the recent rash of
| inflation. And a good worker can realistically double that in
| the 4-6 years that it would take to get a PhD.
|
| So the opportunity cost is staggering, but wait - there's
| more. The job market for tech positions has been very hot for
| the past decade, and the global economy is on the verge of a
| rebound. If you want to learn about a specific field like ML
| or aerospace, you can just get a job in that field. Kids
| graduating today have the option of learning from talented
| and driven people while earning a reasonable salary.
|
| Research certainly has its place; most of the work that we do
| is based off of concepts that were pioneered decades ago. But
| from the perspective of a prospective student in the 2020s,
| it's a hard sell.
|
| Especially since the current advisor/advisee relationship is
| rife with perverse incentives. This whole wall of text
| assumes the best case scenario, where you don't end up in a
| toxic lab.
| twphysicsphd99 wrote:
| The toxic lab/advisor is a very real issue.
|
| I've seen some of my smartest friends stagnate to the point
| of being 9-10th year phds without the ability to navigate
| the job market. These are people at places like MIT and
| Caltech.
|
| One of my regrets was turning down an offer at a FAANG to
| go to grad school in 2014. I finished up in 2020 and
| couldn't even land an interview despite having a pretty
| good publication/open-source track record. My advisor was
| no help on the job market, I felt kicked to the curb.
|
| Took me 1 year to find a job (backend engineer) and I'm
| still grappling with the fact that I wasted my 20's doing a
| PhD when I could've at least enjoyed life a little bit more
| and had a bit of a financial cushion. Honestly, being a swe
| in industry is a vacation compared to the uncertainty and
| workload during the phd.
| caddemon wrote:
| Almost anybody in a position to develop something worthwhile
| from their research wasn't paying tuition and was probably
| getting a stipend. But still the students (and any pre-
| professor researchers) are vastly underpaid for what their
| skillset brings and for the hours they typically work. The
| benefit was supposed to be intellectual freedom...
| musicale wrote:
| I believe some universities make exceptions for open source
| projects, which seems fair. Basically if you want to give
| something away then you can, though the university will still
| own the copyright. I'm not 100% sure how patents work at such
| institutions, but I believe they can potentially be licensed
| for free to open source projects and their derivatives (e.g.
| they won't demand that Apple pay royalties if they use your
| open source software in an iPhone, as long as they abide by the
| open source license terms.)
|
| If you want to make it closed source/proprietary and sell it,
| then the university wants license fees (but you get a cut of
| those fees, so it's sort of a kickback scheme, but the
| university picks the fee and there is a set percentage that you
| get.)
| ok123456 wrote:
| Usually you have to generate several million dollars in
| revenue before you see a red cent of those 'kickbacks'. How
| many times do you honestly think that's going to happen when
| the paper-circuit rewards the "least publishable unit".
| HotHotLava wrote:
| Do computer science grad students in the US commonly apply for
| patents on top of writing papers, etc.?
|
| I'm just wondering where the patents in this pool are coming
| from, I assume the administrators are not going through the
| research papers and file new patents on the researchers'
| behalf?
| unishark wrote:
| > I'm just wondering where the patents in this pool are
| coming from, I assume the administrators are not going
| through the research papers and file new patents on the
| researchers' behalf?
|
| Your assumption is correct in my experience. Despite the
| thread starter's somewhat unusual take, it's more of a system
| based on rewarding inventors with a cut of license fees to
| incentivize them to submit invention disclosures. Then the
| school's IP office determines if it wants to pursue a patent
| on the invention disclosure or not. And open source projects
| are often part of the grant itself, especially in fields like
| CS and statistics, so a professor could specifically choose
| to produce them.
|
| On the other hand though, if a grad student's goal is to take
| their school project and sell it themselves somehow
| subsequently, the school might actually own the rights. So
| this might cause problems at some point with getting funding.
| dmurray wrote:
| The university tells them to apply for patents if they can,
| and provides some of the bureaucracy to make that process
| easier. In the same way that the university - who is their
| employer, after all - tells them to publish papers, TA
| classes, etc. Also, it looks good on your resume. A tenured
| professor may have the academic freedom to ignore these
| incentives, but a grad student or junior academic needs all
| the help they can get.
| Loughla wrote:
| Academia being viewed as a profit center and 'jobs skills'
| training center is just killing my spirit. Those dusty old
| PhD's who get to study one species of butterfly for decades are
| important because of the knowledge they create, not the jobs
| they create.
|
| It's super frustrating to work in higher education right now
| because the focus of every student is 'what job can this get
| me'.
|
| Maybe I'm just old. Maybe I'm just burnt out. Who knows.
| lovelyviking wrote:
| >Maybe I'm just old. Maybe I'm just burnt out. Who knows.
|
| or may be some just have lost their sight about what is
| really important and why academia exists in the first place.
| peter_retief wrote:
| This is not just the US.
| twphysicsphd99 wrote:
| I saw this shift as well.
|
| Project ownership was part of the reason I left acadamia.
|
| I conceived, carried out, and kept 2 projects funded over 6
| years that ended up in nature and science. I was elated by the
| pubs. A few months later a colleague I worked with asked me why
| I wasn't in the patents and I though, what patents? My advisor
| took out patents on the ideas and cited the papers in the
| patents without my knowledge. I didn't argue for the sake of
| leaving with a phd and the probability that those patents would
| yield financial benefit.
|
| The whole thing left me disillusioned with acadamia...I'm much
| happier in industry.
| Gatsky wrote:
| It's easy to get upset about all this. Things happen in cycles
| though. Academia is currently in a lull due to poor incentives,
| oversupply of research staff arising from the massive growth of
| universities and the democratisation of higher education, and
| the general devaluation of experts and technical skills. I also
| see that in certain foundational areas privately funded
| research is outperforming academia, sometimes by silly margins
| (eg Deepmind's protein folding work, Google and quantum
| computing). The protein folding is a good example of why -
| Deepmind had something like 10+ senior researchers working on
| the project, whereas academia has overworked flustered PIs who
| do admin mainly and a few students starting from scratch each
| year. This discrepancy can only exist because academia doesn't
| really care a lot about actual progress. Another interesting
| phenomenon lately has been the total deluge of deep learning
| papers. Once the cat was out of the bag, there was a literal
| explosion of research output in a very short time. One can only
| conclude that there are a lot academics sitting around looking
| for the next big thing (rather than working to create it). This
| is a bit cynical perhaps. There is still progress being made,
| but as others have noted, it definitely seems to be slowing
| overall.
|
| I think actually we haven't seen the worst of it. My theory is
| that the rapidly ageing demographics of the world, which it is
| important to note is totally unprecedented, will have profound
| impacts on research and life in general. Mostly, it will be
| less interest in and funding for research. The cost of caring
| for the elderly is part of it (see where government revenue
| goes in more socialist countries, or observe the huge pension
| liabilities coupled with increasing life span in the USA and
| some of Europe). But there could be less tangible factors, like
| the willingness of a more elderly society to support research
| which will only bear fruit long after many of them are dead.
| This is understandable. Society will fund as much research as
| it sees fit. It is hard to make an actual moral argument for
| funding the kind of extremely expensive, highly technical and
| incremental pursuit that science has become.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I want to just add that most of the current "leading research
| in ML" at Google et al would not be possible without the
| years of foundational research conducted primarily at
| universities before the recent (3rd?) ML hype. Also pretty
| much all the Google researchers were hired away from
| universities I believe. That is the thing, industry hardly
| ever does high risk research that might only pay dividends in
| a decade or more.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| That would frustrate me as well! Did they retaliate against
| anyone for open source? Do you mind if I ask if you went to a
| public or private university? In the US?
| temporallobe wrote:
| This is one tiny iota of an example, but imagine if an
| algorithm like the Fisher-Yates Shuffle was developed in an
| academic setting and became IP to be commercialized.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| It's somewhat ironic that because of academia being
| increasingly managed like industry, you ended up (presumably)
| in industry.
|
| (Not criticizing, it can perfectly make sense - if you're going
| to be subject to all that capitalistic crap anyway, you might
| as well take the higher salary as well. Just pointing out the
| inherent irony in the situation).
| ptero wrote:
| Academia is managed "somewhat" like industry, but only in
| parts. This can combine the worst of both worlds: captive
| employees (tenure tracks), large incompetent bureaucracy
| trying to do business but not skilled or pruned to do it
| effectively, long hours, lower salaries, etc.
| andrepd wrote:
| UK?
| dingo454 wrote:
| I started to work as a staff member of a local research center
| mostly doing foundational research (genetics, life sciences),
| publicly founded so no conflict of interests. At some point,
| the founding body (the local administration) decided that
| general research wasn't cool anymore, and was thought to be a
| waste of money. They should only found "targeted research", an
| idea which sounds good in theory, but in practice is a sure way
| to destroy research at it's core. The first result is that any
| researcher that wasn't working on something mandated from above
| had either to shift (destroying his work) or leave. New
| positions would only be open to work on targeted projects.
|
| The net result was a massive loss of bright researchers,
| massive churn and the death of pretty much any promising
| research endeavor (it's hard to do great research on a 2 years
| contract already, but doing so without infrastructure...).
|
| The administration also started to push aggressively for this
| idea that we should try to apply for patents in anything that
| seems even vaguely applicable, and in order to keep the
| financing going the center had to sign a contract that
| "guarantees an increased in throughput of 2% every year", where
| the throughput is measured in pubblications. Again, this
| requires no explanation for whoever has worked in research, but
| for the others: it's impossible: it just promotes lower and
| lower-quality of output in order to meet the criteria, until it
| will bust.
|
| This also gives an idea how the center and the local
| administration fail to understand how research work on a basic
| principle.
|
| The local group has started to apply aggressively for more and
| more EU grants (which are the only one that can provide vaguely
| sustainable research), which in turn resulted in staff doing
| less research and much more grant writing. We now have staff
| whose purpose is doing just that.
|
| Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of
| the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get:
| aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be
| one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what
| you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great
| research.
|
| It is closely related to a shift in the definition of "what
| purpose should academia serve?"
|
| Basically, old-school academia had the government pay a lot
| of money to universities to do general research and educate
| students to be researchers, and then the military paid more
| money for research that could be usable for military purposes
| (encryption, rocketry, nuclear). Training of new employees
| was paid for by the companies themselves (e.g.
| apprenticeships).
|
| Nowadays, governments have massively cut general research
| budgets (leaving universities and research to the mercy of
| grantors aka the free market), the military is running its
| own show (aka the MIC sucks in enormous amounts of money and
| puts it into private coffers), and companies have outsourced
| training and vetting of new employees to universities and the
| payment for all of that to the students in form of student
| loans, which means that universities are no longer primarily
| a place of research but of schooling.
|
| It's a real disgrace what happened over the last decades, and
| the Western world will pay badly for this since China does
| not follow this turbo-capitalist ideology.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| This is also something addressed in Lyotard's book
| "Postmodern Condition"; the federal funding was more of the
| "end" than the "beginning", in the sense that it was when
| the purpose of the university became "output", rather than
| something else.
|
| He presents two alternatives for "what is the purpose of
| academia?" that date back to the 19th century and earlier.
| On the one hand, is the "German" approach, of "the great
| encyclopedia of knowledge", where the universities steward
| research for its own sake, to discover truths about the
| world. The other hand is the "French" approach, where the
| goal of the university was to produce well-rounded,
| educated citizens. He argues that both of these goals are
| effectively obsolete, and what now matters is
| "performativity", i.e. producing "value".
|
| My sense is that the immense military funding signals the
| initial shift, especially since the fundamental nature of
| the university changed so much as a result of mass
| admissions after the GI bill. No longer was it a sort of
| "special" place for intellectuals; now everybody goes to
| college, so these older, more "romantic" goals become
| problematized.
| amcoastal wrote:
| Not sure why this is being downvoted. If someone has a
| point against this opinion, I'm interested to hear it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Probably because HN generally leans towards a "small
| government", libertarian, capitalist point of view
| whereas I'm advocating for a strong government, social-
| democrat position.
| Retric wrote:
| No, it's trying to justify these changes. Universities
| have become bloated and optimized to suck as much value
| from outside funding sources as possible. The fundamental
| question is if their not paying for research, why exactly
| should they own anything?
|
| This is especially true for students, which are paying
| money to go somewhere and then suddenly also need to give
| up their IP.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >This is especially true for students, which are paying
| money
|
| And before anyone says "stipend" I'd like to point out
| that someone who could work in industry but is instead
| spending an additional couple years doing research is
| incurring a heck of an opportunity cost.
| cycomanic wrote:
| If you make research funding essentially only available
| through competitive grants, then obviously universities
| are applying for those. So yes they are applying for
| outside funding, who else is going to do fundamental
| research?
|
| Also regarding IP, I'm not sure about the US, but in all
| the countries I've worked in students retain their IP. In
| fact looking at some online sources this applies also to
| the US.
|
| It has recently become popular here on HN to bash
| universities, but at least keep it factual.
| monetus wrote:
| (Not the person you were responding to) I'm curious what
| countries you have had experience with? Direct praise of
| the university programs you had may be due?
|
| My favorite audio language, pure data, was created after
| IRCAM kept the IP for max/msp - if I recall correctly.
| This seemed to motivate the author, miller puckette, as
| he seemed to form an ethos of accessibility. Now pure
| data is supposed to have a ~25 year support cycle along
| with mit/bsd licensing. Ableton, a german company, bought
| max/msp after a few decades of it being on its own.
| Jhsto wrote:
| Had a similar experience with Oxbridge this year. They admitted
| me to a PhD program and asked me to pay the fees (which I was
| fine with, I had my own funding source), but they also wanted
| 50-100% of the IPR. Whether it is 50% or 100% depends on their
| consideration whether they see that the funding source has
| contributed to the creation of the IP. If not, Oxbridge owns
| the IP, and you are given rights to license your own work from
| the university.
|
| Some are saying to me it is not as bad as it sounds, and that I
| should go because Oxbridge leads to a better life. But some
| agree with me on the fact that it creates very bad incentives
| for good research. I also asked some current PhD students what
| they think about it, and they told me they never even thought
| about who owns their work. I checked some other universities
| which declared that any IPR is always owned by the student, not
| the university. But, most seem to declare that the work is
| owned at least in part by the funding source, which seems fair
| to me.
|
| A one commentor was very strong in their opinion that most
| universities and especially the UK are currently committing an
| intellectual suicide with how they treat their researchers.
| andi999 wrote:
| It depends a bit on the subject, but most IP generated by
| grad students is not worth much. Of course if you specialize
| in something where you see the commercial possibility from
| the beginning and aim to do that to start your company:ok,
| consider this things, otherwise don't bother.
| Jhsto wrote:
| > most IP generated by grad students is not worth much
|
| I have heard this a lot. My counterargument is that if that
| is the case, why do they want the IP anyway? Of course they
| can say that the IP is half created by the professor, but
| on the other hand, isn't that what I am paying for the
| university?
|
| > where you see the commercial possibility from the
| beginning and aim to do that to start your company
|
| And yes, if you personally plan to have any stake in the IP
| you have to think this beforehand: you must have a stake in
| the private company that funds your studies. Otherwise (and
| in the best case, i.e. 50% split) the IP will just be split
| between the university and your funder. So, you have to
| start a company in order to ever own any IP personally. I
| was told that LLCs for PhDs are somewhat common nowadays by
| the university IP people.
|
| Generally, I think making a billion or a million dollars on
| my PhD project are extraordinarily slim, but it is not like
| these constraints exactly help either. The way I see it, is
| that I already take a financial toll in opportunity costs
| by doing a PhD. It is borderline charity when you also give
| the black-swan option to the university to own all proceeds
| if it ever becomes of significant impact, which I thought
| be the whole point of science.
|
| The whole DD process has been quite frustrating to me, as
| you can see, but it also makes me wonder how does the
| current system even produce anything worth of significance
| given the lacklustre incentives. Finally, FWIW, yes the
| topic is computer science: the IP restrictions do not
| concern any other subject.
| andi999 wrote:
| Just to address the first point. Often a group has a
| software basis where probably 100 PhD years contributed.
| This of course has value for the group (it might even
| have a general value), but this wouldn't be possible if
| you kept your IP. So yes the work under a professor
| giving good guidance and ideas to a couple of PhD
| students has value. But this value shd be attributed if
| any to the professor. And here you could say, well it was
| funded by the university so it belongs to them. Here you
| could make a point that the prof shd get the IP.
| hlandau wrote:
| Interestingly the fallout of this practice isn't just
| academic. Colin Percival, who is the author of Tarsnap and
| who sometimes posts here, is also the author of bsdiff, an
| efficient binary delta patching algorithm. His website notes
| he implemented a superior version of this algorithm for his
| 2006 Oxford PhD thesis. I seem to recall him mentioning years
| ago that the IP for this superior version belonged to Oxford,
| and how he hoped they would at some point give him permission
| to release the code for it. As far as I'm aware nothing has
| been heard since, though maybe I missed something.
| cperciva wrote:
| They eventually did give me permission, but I never got
| around to cleaning up the code for release.
| angrais wrote:
| Have you perhaps written a paper or article that
| highlights the differences? I'd like to learn more and
| don't know much about diff algorithms.
|
| Also, am sure myself and others would be interested to
| see your current/old code.
| cperciva wrote:
| The second chapter of my thesis describes the version of
| bsdiff I wrote as part of my doctorate.
| austinjp wrote:
| In my reading [0,1] Cambridge is more lenient than Oxford
| about intellectual property. I've heard that Cambridge is one
| of the more lenient universities in the UK regarding IP,
| although I don't have experience or data to back that up.
|
| Your university will (should!) provide talks or contact with
| their IP department, spin-out office, etc. You should be able
| to ask pertinent questions of them in confidence. Make a
| contact there, and ask for an off-the-record conversation,
| they should be amenable.
|
| In my limited experience, universities are averse to some
| monetisation approaches that are frequently used in computing
| businesses, for example open-sourcing the code and monetising
| a service that deploys/supports it. (I'm aware of
| difficulties with this model, just using it as an example.)
| Instead, they are far more familiar with approaches such as
| patenting a new algorithm and selling enterprise licenses.
|
| If you're planning a business model that the university would
| _not_ be interested in, you should be able to get them to
| confirm a lack of interest. This leaves you with the issue of
| whether you 've developed something patentable. I've never
| been in that position so I wouldn't know, but I'm curious
| about how a university would respond to a student open-
| sourcing every piece of code they develop as they go.
| Academically this seems a great thing to do, but universities
| are commercial enterprises, and they might take a dim view.
|
| The usual "I am not a lawyer" caveat applies to everything
| I've written here. I'd also strongly advise against any
| action that is likely to see you go up against a university's
| legal department, because they'd crush you :)
|
| [0] https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-
| course/examinat...
|
| [1] https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-
| xvi-pr... and
| https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/council-
| regula...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I've heard that Cambridge felt they were having problems
| with training up students with machine learning PhDs only
| for them to turn around and disappear into high-paying jobs
| in industry (rather than going on to the academic jobs the
| university thought they were training them for.) I think
| the university is putting some of their own funding into
| PhD (and undergraduate) students and so they felt like they
| were getting a poor deal and instituted some policies to
| try to reduce this from happening, and the opinion was that
| it was just terrible for the universities computer science
| department because good candidates would not subject
| themselves to the new conditions.
|
| But that might just be outdated or inaccurate or totally
| wrong.
| mijoharas wrote:
| I believe Cambridge is quite good (the best in the UK I
| believe) at spin-outs (at least for hard-tech companies)
| and that's what has given rise to the "silicon fen" [0] and
| "the cambridge phenomenon" [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Fen
|
| [1] https://cambridgephenomenon.com/phenomenon/
| majormajor wrote:
| > But, most seem to declare that the work is owned at least
| in part by the funding source, which seems fair to me.
|
| There's a dark side here - and the common refrain of "if paid
| for with public money, it should be in the public domain" -
| of normalizing the power of capital holders compared to the
| people doing the work. Most of the time, that idea is going
| to have bad public outcomes, so I don't like playing into it
| with regard to journals and research publications.
| michaelt wrote:
| I've got some sympathy for this in the case of countries
| other than the US and China.
|
| After all, if Stanford does research funded by the US
| taxpayer, develops a new ML technology and gives it away for
| free, Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it,
| which they'll pay US taxes on.
|
| But if Ecole Polytechnique does research funded by the French
| taxpayer, develops a new ML technology and gives it away for
| free? Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it,
| which they'll pay US taxes on - while the French economy will
| see a much smaller upside.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it, which
| they'll pay US taxes on.
|
| hahahhaahhaaa. Um no. Possibly some Irish taxes? Maybe some
| Virgin Islands taxes?
| [deleted]
| emodendroket wrote:
| At the very least they're going to be doing payroll
| taxes.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Google and Facebook are both multinational companies,
| employing people in many different countries. I guess
| there's probably a majority of their payroll expenses in
| the USA, but I have no idea.
| ezoe wrote:
| Pay to research and pay to use the fruits of your research?
| What kind of shameless parasite are they?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| A friend of mine was refused permission to use their own
| research in their startup. It wasn't even about the amount of
| the licence fee, it was a straightforward "if you start a
| business, you'll be doing less research for us. Let someone
| else licence your research and start the business, and you
| carry on doing more research".
|
| Luckily they managed to avoid the specific IP in the papers
| that the university owned, and start the startup anyway. It
| has gone on to be a successful business.
|
| Obviously, the university lost out in every conceivable way
| from this scenario. Literally any other course of action
| would have given them a better result. Play stupid games,
| etc.
|
| edit: this was Australia btw
| anoncake wrote:
| Because people are inclined to do research for a university
| with that kind of policy? Quite optimistic.
| caddemon wrote:
| It's surprisingly common for PhD programs to restrict
| outside activities, although that's probably field
| dependent. Not the same as the OPs story but I know
| multiple neuroscience programs where if you are receiving
| any funding from the University you are barred from
| working other jobs. There were always a couple students
| that snuck around and bartended on the side anyway, but
| it was crazy to me they had to actively hide this from
| the school - and not even just their PIs but also random
| program admins. I never understood why programs think
| they should be able to control students outside of
| working hours, but it doesn't stop most people. One of
| these programs gets over 500 applications a year for ~20
| spots.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| > I never understood why programs think they should be
| able to control students outside of working hours
|
| They think this for the same reasons all employers think
| this; employment is a watered down form of _ownership_.
|
| Advancement up the social hierarchy allows one to abuse
| the people below them. As near as I can tell from my own
| experience: money and _control_ are the things you
| receive as rewards.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Because when you are a grad student there really aren't
| "working hours". Your project is supposed what you are
| devoting all of your effort to. In part this is due to
| your advisor wanting results and papers, but these also
| help _you_.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| > It's surprisingly common for PhD programs to restrict
| outside activities, although that's probably field
| dependent.
|
| It's also supervisor-dependent! After I was formally
| accepted into a post-grad program, I was talking to my
| supervisor, my then-recent engagement slipped into the
| conversation and h - a senior bachelor and resident grump
| - did not approve of me getting married. He thought it
| would be distraction; I very much doubt that it was
| departmental policy, but my future research hinged on his
| whims.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Are they aware that we don't do slavery anymore? Because
| that sounded a lot like indentured servitude.
| katten wrote:
| In Sweden at 2000, there were a couple of students that made a
| software to Volvo that could detect if the driver was tired.
| This driver alert system was the first in the world.
|
| Both students were not employees of Volvo, but still forced to
| register the system to Volvos internal system for innovation
| and got 122 000 SEK (15 k $).
|
| 2014 they got help from Swedish engineers for a lawsuit towards
| Volvo cars about 8,7 million sek/student (around 1 million $)
| for the system (about 3% of the worth of the sales system). Now
| the lawsuit was drawn back and they did meet on a secret sum
| from the company and both are today employees of Volvo.
|
| With that said, from what I can see the Academia/Chalmers did
| not try to take any % of the cut.
|
| Link to the article:
| https://www.gp.se/ekonomi/volvo-g%C3%B6r-upp-om-miljontvist-...
|
| Link to Swedish engineers: https://www.sverigesingenjorer.se
| cycomanic wrote:
| Chalmers does not even retain IP from employees, much less
| students. The case with the students and Volvo was because
| they were doing a masters thesis at Volvo and Volvo was
| trying to claim that all IP developed during that belonged to
| them. However in Europe such agreements are likely invalid,
| because an agreement always has to be beneficial to both
| sides, in this case to give up your IP you have to be paid.
|
| It's quite funny that so many here are claiming universities
| are claiming student IP, but one of the main cases we find is
| of a company trying to claim IP without paying.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Grants from the NSF, etc. should only be granted on the condition
| that the research produced enters the public domain. Taxpayer
| dollars should not go towards producing research the public
| cannot benefit from without paying to license a patent or access
| a $100 journal article.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Not sure I 100% agree. Commercializing creates jobs, tax
| income, and encourages the best and brightest to focus on the
| issue. Many researchers in academia are still monetary driven.
|
| Those journals "peer review" and provide a quality bar for the
| content. The government didn't cover the journal cost but
| instead covered the research cost.
|
| Your asking for the government to additionally have its own
| scientific publication journal that is free. Not a bad idea,
| but also maybe not the best of ideas.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > Commercializing creates jobs, tax income, and encourages
| the best and brightest to focus on the issue.
|
| There's nothing preventing the fruits of research from being
| commercialised just because that research has been made
| public domain.
|
| > Your asking for the government to additionally have its own
| scientific publication journal that is free. Not a bad idea,
| but also maybe not the best of ideas.
|
| There is already a similar requirement for NIH grants.
| Research produced with NIH grants has to be made available on
| PubMed Central.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Pubmed is accessible to the world. Not just American
| entities. Wouldn't it benefit America to ensure funded
| research is used to benefit the American interest.
|
| Not saying it's right but the system I believe is currently
| WAI.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Well, that does it, I suppose. We can't require that
| public money goes to actually benefiting the public
| because God forbid people outside of America might also
| benefit from it.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Research is one of the most international activities.
| Trying to restrict it to only be open to your nation will
| quickly land you in a spot where you quickly fall behind.
| new299 wrote:
| I've worked almost exclusively with university spinouts.
|
| I would say in almost all cases the foundational approach/IP
| has not been taken forward. New IP was developed, which was
| more suitable for building a commercial product.
|
| I'd actually be interested in any examples where university
| IP has successfully been taken forward (particularly in
| Biotech).
|
| Mostly the universities provide effectively training, and a
| background of scientific techniques which can help build
| companies... but specific IP... not so much.
| unishark wrote:
| Universities also add prestige and provide protection for
| the IP. It may be a good deal or not depending on the
| price.
| chalst wrote:
| > Many researchers in academia are still monetary driven.
|
| "Money driven" suggests that is the primary motivation,
| although I'm not sure that is what you meant: I think that's
| fairly rare in academia. Money is a consideration for most
| academics, but prestige generally is a much more important
| driver.
| cma wrote:
| This could suffer tragedy of the commons due to other nations.
| If all is free why would another smaller country bother to
| invest in research? I still think their are better solutions to
| be found, but that problem would need to be addressed.
| m-ee wrote:
| That would eliminate all of SBIR funding, but maybe that's what
| you want?
|
| I worked for a start up that was spun out thanks to an
| exclusive license to the technology the founder developed at a
| university lab, and then supported with SBIR money. I agree
| with the article that these types of arrangements are on the
| whole a good thing. The company failed but without that license
| we wouldn't have had a chance, large companies would have no
| reason to partner with us if they could have the tech for free,
| or we might have been sued into submission by some of the more
| trolly companies in the space.
| lmm wrote:
| Protecting small businesses from patent trolls sounds like a
| good use of public funds, but surely there's a better way to
| do it than patenting university research and then picking
| particular businesses to bestow defensive patents on.
| m-ee wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a defensive patent just because it kept
| the trolls at bay, it was a genuine innovation we were
| actively trying to commercialize. And it wasn't just some
| random business, it was the inventor himself setting out to
| build the product he envisioned. Unfortunately he didn't
| have much of a mind for commercial hardware engineering,
| but it seems fair that he be the one to have a go at it.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| What was the tech? Often when I read these patents it is
| something that anyone working in a given field could
| eventually come up with. It's like claiming new land and then
| rent seeking.
| mannerheim wrote:
| What does the taxpayer get back? Do you pay back the money?
| Does the government get an ownership stake? And if it didn't
| exist, does private equity not exist?
| unishark wrote:
| The govt gets an unrestricted license to use the technology
| produced by SBIR funding.
|
| The "R" in SBIR is research. By the end of govt funding
| (phase II), the company is supposed to commercialize it on
| their own. The money maxes out around $1M, for producing a
| prototype only.
|
| Compared to private equity, it's only angel-investment-
| sized funding, but for a high-risk project that requires
| research to demonstrate so angel investment will not
| suffice. It is not ready to launch after govt funding.
| [deleted]
| _delirium wrote:
| The goal of SBIR is to provide seed funding for American
| small businesses engaged in innovation, and is one of the
| more popular parts of federal science funding, across
| parties. People like small businesses. They don't really
| like private equity.
|
| Making the results of U.S.-funded research exploitable
| without license by foreign entities is also very unpopular.
| That is one reason the U.S. does not have a public domain
| mandate of the kind you propose.
|
| I would personally be open to your suggestion that the
| government should take an ownership percentage in return
| for its funding. I don't think this has been seriously
| proposed, but it has interesting implications.
| biztos wrote:
| > the government should take an ownership percentage in
| return for its funding
|
| But wouldn't that create a big conflict of interest?
|
| WidgetCorp is 10% owned by the Feds, InterWidget is not.
| Who gets the contract for those $6M widgets in the new
| fighter jet?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I have every confidence that the people picking
| contractors won't let a 10% stake owned by the federal
| government cloud their judgement.
|
| If the stake was owned by any of the relevant
| institutions then that might play a role, since it could
| contribute in some way to the institution's budget
| perhaps.
|
| But it's an interesting idea. If the government were to
| take a percentage in return for funding, there could be
| an explicit goal of getting out of the position with X
| times return in less than Y years. X might not have to be
| particularly large, the goal would only be to cover
| losses and inflation.
| fungi wrote:
| How does you having a patent 'A' protect you from trolly
| companies with patent 'B'? Or does it just give you access to
| funding to fight said tolls?
| mannerheim wrote:
| If they're trolly but a real company, each of you can sue
| the other; it's basically MAD. Won't work with an actual
| troll/NPE, but it's the reason why tech companies build
| patent portfolios even if they don't intend to sue anyone.
| m-ee wrote:
| Yeah you nailed it. This was ostensibly a technology
| company but they haven't put out any real products I'm
| aware of in long time and have extracted some large
| amounts from big tech over the years. If they tried to
| knock us off or invalidate our patent the university
| would have gotten involved, that's not a profitable
| avenue for them. Without that protection they likely
| would have set up a meeting to say "oh that's really
| interesting work, but you know we have a patent that
| covers this so really it's our work you understand"
| zucker42 wrote:
| Not to denigrate your work, but if the company failed in
| retrospect wouldn't it have been better for society if it
| didn't have the patent? I would think that the situation
| where the one company with rights to the invention fails to
| commercialize it is exactly what we don't want.
| m-ee wrote:
| Do you think there is value in small businesses and
| startups? The original intent of the patent system was to
| give inventors a leg up to commercialize their idea before
| they can be bullied out of the market by large competitors.
| Without that patent large companies would have taken the
| idea and either implemented it without giving anything to
| the inventors, or more likely filed their own IP on the
| idea, kept it on a shelf, and sued anyone who tried to
| pursue it. As I mentioned before there was a pretty
| litigious player in that space.
|
| We courted partners and investors, went to trade shows etc.
| The idea is out there. If anyone wants it bad enough they
| could contact my old boss and his university to figure out
| how to license it. Otherwise they can wait 4-5 years and
| have at it. Giving the IP to someone who deeply understands
| it and wants to bring it to market is a worthwhile goal in
| my opinion, even if it its not always attainable.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> The original intent of the patent system was to give
| inventors a leg up to commercialize their idea before
| they can be bullied out of the market by large
| competitors._
|
| Almost... I think there is a subtle difference in what
| the intent was/is.
|
| The point of the patent system is to incentivize
| inventors to make their creations available to _the
| public_. The time-limited monopoly to their invention
| (the patent) is the incentive. But you need to make
| enough details public to get the patent so that someone
| else can also take advantage of the invention. This is
| the public benefit... eventually, the public has access
| to an invention.
|
| So, yes, the idea is to give companies a head start to
| commercialize an idea, but that's not the reason in and
| of itself. The reason is to make the invention available
| to the _public_ , so that the public can benefit from the
| invention. And after a few years, it will be freely
| available. The limited monopoly is a financial incentive
| to keep the company working on the idea. Yes, it's a
| barrier to competitors, but it's also a potential reward
| for developing the idea.
|
| In your case, I think the system worked (and Bayh-Dole in
| general works). Even though the company ultimately
| failed, the company had an incentive to try and
| commercialize the invention. This could have benefited
| the public by having access to a product that didn't
| exist before. But, even if the company fails in the
| market, after a certain amount of time, the public still
| has the patented information.
|
| Really, the idea behind Bayh-Dole (which created these
| University-based IP systems) was to get inventions and
| data out of universities and into the public-domain.
| Otherwise, there would be billions in research that would
| be sitting on a shelf somewhere, or mentioned in a paper,
| but never used to benefit the public. Without that patent
| incentive, would your company ever have been formed?
| Would the research ever been commercialized? Likely not.
| Isinlor wrote:
| The issue is that patents are designed to be as useless
| as possible at revealing anything and as broad as
| possible at claiming everything.
| mbreese wrote:
| You won't get any arguments from me that the current
| system isn't broken. I personally believe that we'd get a
| lot farther if every claim on a patent had to be "reduced
| to practice", that is -- actually done. I think change
| alone this would help to get rid of trolls from the
| system.
|
| But I don't think it would be better if we didn't have
| patents at all. So many things are currently protected by
| trade secrets and not disclosed. Imagine if it were all
| kept secret... I don't think that would benefit the
| public interest. And that was the original goal --
| benefiting the public.
| zucker42 wrote:
| > The original intent of the patent system was to give
| inventors a leg up to commercialize their idea before
| they can be bullied out of the market by large
| competitors.
|
| I disagree that this was originally or should be
| currently the sole goal of the patent system. The purpose
| of patents is "to promote the progress of useful arts".
| As in, the patent system should assist in making the
| invention useful, public, and widely available. The
| patent system should not exist to promote the individual
| interests of companies, though that might be a necessary
| side effect.
|
| Frankly, the idea that an invention should remain behind
| a paywall even though it is no longer being developed or
| commercialized does not seem like a good system to me. It
| seems like a system designed to protect the patent holder
| over the public.
| _0ffh wrote:
| >The original intent of the patent system was to give
| inventors a leg up to commercialize their idea before
| they can be bullied out of the market by large
| competitors
|
| Maybe, but I don't care at this point what the purported
| intent was. Reality is, it failed and made things much
| worse. The whole patent system, at this point, serves
| mainly as a barrier for small companies to enter the
| market. The best thing that could be done with it is to
| burn it to the ground.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Given that in a global market system anyone contending
| with the patent system and its abusers, also has to
| contend with market competition from countries such as
| China which aren't interested in honoring the IP rules in
| the first place, I find it hard to argue with your
| conclusion.
|
| Looks like arbitrary rent-seeking and random intellectual
| piracy to me. A cover for barratry as an income stream.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Imaginary Property is just a term ginned up by lawyers to
| parasitize actual productivity. It was invented by
| lawyers, for lawyers.
|
| Fuck IP and fuck lawyers.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| No one is going to commercialize anything without exclusive
| rights. The hard part isn't in creating an invention[0],
| it's making an invention into a product that can be married
| to a market. Never mind that if someone out of the public
| does want to have another go, IP can be bought from the
| failed company in liquidation or it will be abandoned when
| filing fees lapse.
|
| [0]See every news article about how the latest research out
| of Misc. U is going to revolutionize lithium batteries, vs.
| the number of actual revolutions in lithium ion batteries.
| zucker42 wrote:
| I disagree that no one is going to commercialize anything
| without exclusive rights. Most things that are
| commercialized are done so without exclusive rights. We
| don't see restaurants patent new dishes, yet they create
| new dishes nonetheless. Most web startups don't have
| exclusive rights to their ideas. Drugs in the public
| domain still get produced and sold.
| ticviking wrote:
| NSF funding has a different purpose than SBIR funding.
|
| If we're paying for it under the justification of "Science is
| good for the country" then it should enter in the public
| domain.
|
| If we're paying for it because "We want to invest in small
| businesses" then it should be the property of the business.
|
| Programs will need to choose to apply for the kind of grant
| that makes sense for what they're doing.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Someone paying you to do research and then you not giving
| them the results of that research is theft. Doing it to
| millions of taxpayers who weren't asked whether they wanted
| to fund you makes it exponentially worse, not better.
| Publicly-funded research not entering the public domain is
| damn near treasonous.
| musicale wrote:
| > Someone paying you to do research and then you not giving
| them the results of that research is theft
|
| Presumably we wish to incentivize invention. But the idea
| that the taxpayers should own a significant share of what
| they pay for has merit.
|
| Public domain is interesting because it arguably benefits
| the rest of the world more than the originating country.
| [deleted]
| cwkoss wrote:
| > Public domain is interesting because it arguably
| benefits the rest of the world more than the originating
| country.
|
| I could understand benefits equally, but how does it
| benefit other countries more than originating country?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Net benefit, not gross. Other countries can have the
| innovation with none of the investment. I can easily
| think up a scheme where countries pump their brightest to
| go to a country with good infrastructure and lax public
| domain rules and reap the benefits.
| ninjanomnom wrote:
| There are more people in countries that aren't the
| originating country. Anything which benefits everyone
| equally will benefit that group more, it's not about an
| individual other country benefiting more.
|
| It's technically true but I find it to be another
| unfortunate example of "us" vs "them"
| 8note wrote:
| By funding the invention, the origin country also gets
| the inventors, who are likely more valuable than the
| invention itself.
|
| Having the capability to invent seems way more powerful
| than having access to inventions
| tester34 wrote:
| only for some peroid of time, later you lose that
| advantage, I guess
| int_19h wrote:
| The rest of the world using the invention does not
| diminish its utility to the country that invented it.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| It diminishes how much money the country that invented it
| can make.
| int_19h wrote:
| I think the problem is that we're thinking about
| everything in terms of money. The primary purpose of
| publicly subsidized innovations should be to make life
| easier and better, not to earn money for the government.
| We have taxes for the latter.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| Exaggerating a little? There is lots of government
| subsidies for all sort of company business activities (in
| many countries companies can get tax credits etc for doing
| R&D for example). Research funding is one of the smallest
| fish in this pond.
| m-ee wrote:
| It was money explicitly given to the company for the
| purpose of building a business. But if you wanna view me as
| a thief for getting my salary from it go ahead, with all
| the pork barrel spending, tax cuts, iffy DOD contracts out
| there the SBIR program seems like an odd target of disdain.
| asdff wrote:
| NIH funded research goes public open access on pubmed after 1
| year
| mannerheim wrote:
| Yes, I know, and this should be extended to any research that
| receives government funding.
| danielfoster wrote:
| There's a lot to say in favor of this and I generally agree.
| It's frustrating to see taxpayer money used in this way. If the
| government were to say, "taypayer money = open access," it
| would need to factor in the many situations where taxpayer
| funding is combined with private investment. This includes the
| time and professional reputation of the project owners, who may
| be risking a decade or more of their career on an innovative
| idea that might not pan out.
|
| This is just my perspective from researching SBIR grants, which
| are generally $100,000 - $250,000. This is enough to fund a
| component of a project or get started, but this deceiving large
| amount really isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.
|
| It would be interesting to isolate projects where taxpayer
| dollars constitute a majority of the funding and go from there.
| teekert wrote:
| Public money, public code.
| lvs wrote:
| Look up the Bayh-Dole Act.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >"Patents aren't needed to share knowledge [...]" //
|
| Obviously, but are they needed to reward/stimulate innovation?
|
| One can view this, the situation of the OP, as Universities going
| after commercial enterprise who are exploring the universities
| inventive output but are not putting funding into that community.
| Licensing fees would ensure that those companies using a
| universities innovations help to pay for future innovations.
|
| Patents do what non-commercial and share-alike aspects of free-
| libre copyright licensing does; provides a way for financial
| profit to flow back to innovation centres.
|
| It strikes me the _main_ issue in USA with trolls is a poor
| patent-legal system, not the existence of patents themselves.
| Though the USC's liberal acceptance of business method and
| software patents probably isn't helping.
| motohagiography wrote:
| This looks like a way to enforce social governance by secondary
| means. e.g. "company X, you must adopt these policies or we will
| use these esoteric things you can't reason about to use
| litigation to isolate you from investors and major customers."
|
| It is utterly pernicious, especially because they are apparently
| collecting bundles of low quality patents that are primarily a
| source of legal uncertainty that they can leverage politically
| via legal channels. Whether patent aggregators like this are the
| intent of IP regulation is dubious, and this organization seems
| like an arbitrage play against a convention to not be an anti-
| social PoS.
|
| The two factors that could make this a storm are that a) schools
| are very likely not bound by anti-competitive regulations that
| would prevent them colluding to create a provisional militant
| lawfare body to engage in threatening other organizations, and b)
| the architecture of the patent system does not anticipate someone
| aggregating patents based on their weakness and uncertainty to
| weild as a political weapon.
|
| Maybe this is uncharitable, but as someone who remembers the
| total nonsense vortex that was SCO the first time around, and in
| security I have watched the various efforts to establish
| influence over FOSS via crypto backdoors and other means, this
| effort looks like a macro-strategic play to seize the means of
| production.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| EFF: You just now got the memo?
|
| I know a guy who regularly goes IP shopping to a number of top
| private and public universities, and they welcome him with open
| arms. They will gladly license and sell that shit all day long
| because it's a business.
| rmason wrote:
| I think the damage the Universities in this group will do to
| their brand will far exceed what ever money they make as a patent
| troll.
|
| I was glad that my alma mater of Michigan State was not on the
| list but our neighbor to the South the University of Michigan was
| included.
|
| Ann Arbor for years has been the strongest entrepreneurial
| community in the state (with Detroit coming up fast) and I have
| to wonder what their reaction would be to this news?
| Andy_G11 wrote:
| Universities should get some financial credit for inventions
| arising from their studies. But there might be instances where
| important science should be undertaken even if it offers no
| medium term opportunity for commercial reward.
|
| E.g. studying sea urchin skeleton formation could provide
| insights into blood vessel growth in humans, but which co would
| pay someone to study sea urchins in the first place? Or mole rats
| - in the course of studying the creatures, scientists realised
| that they are age-defying - but which co would pay for the
| initial few decades of mole rat research that led to this
| realisation?
|
| Commercial gain is only a problem if it becomes the tail that
| wags the dog of science, narrowing its scope for the pursuit of
| short term profit.
|
| If universities are going to collaborate in research, then
| allowing multiple universities to benefit from patents arising
| from joint research makes sense, else patents would raise a
| competitive bar between scientists which would be counter-
| productive.
| emsign wrote:
| Universities have incorporated scams and hussling for money into
| their very foundation in a destructive and predatory manner.
| Young smart people should really consider if they want get
| defrauded of their future by enrolling there.
| xenihn wrote:
| Pension funds tied to universities are also buying up homes in
| major cities throughout the country (often near universities),
| further harming the young people they were originally meant to
| serve.
| javajosh wrote:
| It would be hilarious if every patent-holding individual sued a
| non-practicing entity for infringement. Ideally they would do it
| simultaneously in every conceivable venue, nationwide. Call it
| "Patent Month". Make it an annual ritual, a coming out party for
| freshly minted IP attorneys to cut their teeth.
|
| But seriously, what a shame. Can you imagine if calculus was
| patented and made artificially scarce to enrich someone? How much
| poorer would the world be?
| dgb23 wrote:
| How much richer would it be if it went into the other
| direction!
| nnvvhh wrote:
| How can you sue an NPE for infringement when they are not
| practicing the invention?
| javajosh wrote:
| They still have to use phones, fax machines, computers,
| software, and the internet, right?
| inigojonesguy wrote:
| I have two questions:
|
| 1. many times in HN comments I saw the opinion that ideas are
| cheap and scaling is everything, so why do you care if
| universities keep the patents?
|
| 2. from the point of view of the academic researcher, is there
| any difference between patent kept by university and no patent,
| but scaled by a company?
| jdonaldson wrote:
| As part of my graduate studies I was able to get funding from a
| research-oriented startup. The amount of hoops I had to jump
| through with the university to clear all of their IP related
| concerns, _and_ to come away with a small fraction of the funding
| for living expenses was surprising. It made me realized that the
| university wasn 't really on my side, and soured me on an
| academic career.
|
| I wound up setting up funding through a clinical trial protocol
| that's normally reserved for medical testing. I love the people
| at my old grad school, but I think academia (in general) is
| putting administration, IP concerns, and rights management above
| everything else... and if that's the case you might as well go
| into industry and at least get paid properly. I loved my research
| (in recommender systems), and I was willing to sacrifice a good
| deal to focus on that. However, past a certain point I wasn't.
| jon37 wrote:
| The actual EFF headline is, "15 Universities Have Formed A
| Company That Looks A Lot Like A Patent Troll". Why was the number
| "15" omitted from the HN headline? It seems to imply that
| universities _in general_ are guilty of this. Even if it 's true,
| the article doesn't make that argument.
|
| In general I agree with with the EFF that this consortium and
| software patents in general are harmful. But this change to the
| headline seems like an editorial twist; it changes the framing of
| the story.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Probably an overzealous attempt to meet this site guideline:
|
| _If the title contains a gratuitous number or number +
| adjective, we 'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate
| "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to
| "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5
| Platonic Solids."_
| lanevorockz wrote:
| Maybe because it is ? As covid proves that universities are
| becoming expensive childcare it might actually break their
| business model. Remember Steve Jobs ? or Bill Gates ? or Elon
| Must ? Maybe these guys knew a thing or two about hiring the
| right people.
| benatkin wrote:
| I'm proud that my Alma Mater isn't on that list. Being mediocre
| occasionally pays off!
| theknocker wrote:
| The descent of academia into elitist antagonizers of the public
| continues. Purely gatekeepers. Inferior to the internet at their
| stated mission.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >In other words, they'll be demanding licensing fees over lots
| and lots of software patents. By and large, software patents are
| the lowest quality patents, and their rise has coincided with the
| rise of large-scale patent trolling.
|
| Software patents are just a way for lawyers to parasitize some of
| the productivity (wealth) created by software engineers and
| companies that actually build things.
|
| They should be summarily banned.
|
| Now that congress is "only" 40% lawyers (down from 80%) we might
| be able to get such legislation through government. But I'm sure
| lobbyists will do everything they can to block it.
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