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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the whose-patents-are-they? dept.

A few weeks ago, administrators at Penn State University did something they believed had never been attempted in American academia: The school put about 70 engineering patents up for auction and tried to sell them to the highest bidder. They weren't so successful - not many patents sold - but the project has disturbing implications. What if all this intellectual property, based on research done at a public institution, were to end up in the hands of someone less interested in innovation than in hauling companies to court? What if Penn State auctioned its inventions to a greedy patent troll?

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  • (Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:29PM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:29PM (#41093)
    Then those who are interested in innovation will have to innovate.
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:37PM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:37PM (#41096) Journal

    I think the Universities should License (non-exclusively) the use of their patents, rather than sell them outright. The chance of it becoming troll food is lessened this way. The chance of the research actually making it into real products is greater.

    The licensing fees can start out low and move higher if they happen to be licensed to people who come up with a very popular product.

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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by black6host on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:50PM

      by black6host (3827) on Thursday May 08 2014, @11:50PM (#41100) Journal

      While I like your idea better than what currently exists I have to ask the question: Are they receiving taxpayer funds? If so then any patents derived should belong to the people who paid for it. Same thing with NIH and funds used to develop drugs which are then patented by big pharma. I'm tired of paying for research only to have to pay again.

      Sure, a company making the product/meds/etc should get paid for their effort and outlay of capital. That can happen without granting exclusivity in the form of patents.

      • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday May 09 2014, @12:14AM

        by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 09 2014, @12:14AM (#41103)
        "While I like your idea better than what currently exists I have to ask the question: Are they receiving taxpayer funds? If so then any patents derived should belong to the people who paid for it."

        Why? If they need taxpayer funds to do research, why can't they lessen the dependency on taxpayers by selling some of the patents, especially when most of them will likely wind up in products taxpayers will eventually be able to purchase?
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        • (Score: 2) by black6host on Friday May 09 2014, @12:42AM

          by black6host (3827) on Friday May 09 2014, @12:42AM (#41111) Journal

          I don't believe it will lesson the burden on the taxpayer. One, it's not like the universities are going to give the money back. Two, the company that buys the license to the patent, or the patent itself, is simply going to include that as a cost of producing the product and then pass that cost onto the consumer.

          Kind of how CDs were supposed to be so much cheaper than vinyl because manufacturing costs would be decreased. We didn't see that happen. Same thing with cable television. Pay for cable and no commercials! How long did that last? Companies will make money anyway they can and they're not going to eat any costs that can be passed on.

          • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday May 09 2014, @01:00AM

            by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 09 2014, @01:00AM (#41117)
            I think you have a strong point, there. But don't you think if they have more money in their general account they'll use that for the purchases the tax payer won't be fond of?
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            • (Score: 2) by black6host on Friday May 09 2014, @01:40AM

              by black6host (3827) on Friday May 09 2014, @01:40AM (#41121) Journal

              That's too vague a question for me to answer simply because I have no idea what they'd spend the money on.

              I do believe, however, that I'd rather not be in a position of having to choose the lesser of two evils. Here's how it should work, IMO: University is funded (in part, I know..) and conducts research that is beneficial to mankind. That technology is then used for the benefit of all without added costs to the consumer.

              Again, if a company wants to make a product using the technology they should be compensated. And they would be if their product was something that people wanted. Companies should not be entitled to exclusive rights to sell us a product that we helped fund the development of. If that's what they want then they can spend their own money on R&D and charge whatever they want. Just don't make me pay for the development and then charge me for the benefit they received from taxpayer funding. I've already paid once.

            • (Score: 1) by sbgen on Friday May 09 2014, @08:54PM

              by sbgen (1302) on Friday May 09 2014, @08:54PM (#41386)

              I wish you were right. As it is right now large chunk of the research funding (paid by tax payers) that researchers get goes to the universities as over-head before getting to the research part. Why would that change if 'the dependency on the tax payer is reduced'?

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              • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday May 09 2014, @09:07PM

                by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 09 2014, @09:07PM (#41390)
                I'm wondering if they'd make less frivilous requests of the taxpayer. But I do take your point, it's not too likely they'd say "here's some of your money back!"
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        • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday May 09 2014, @12:50AM

          by aristarchus (2645) on Friday May 09 2014, @12:50AM (#41113) Journal

          Because it is not their property!! And because they are not a person, unless universities have become corporations. And furthermore, because it is not property, it is intellectual, which means it cannot be owned. Only some kind of mercenary intellectual property monger would even consider this sort of restraint in human knowledge and research.

        • (Score: 1) by hoochiecoochieman on Friday May 09 2014, @09:48AM

          by hoochiecoochieman (4158) on Friday May 09 2014, @09:48AM (#41180)

          If they need taxpayer funds to do research, why can't they lessen the dependency on taxpayers by selling some of the patents

          You forgot the Second Law of Public-Private Deals: The dependency on taxpayers never decreases. When two systems are connected together, and one is public and the other is private, all the profits flow to the private side, and all the costs flow to the public side.

          A very good example is the privatisation of public services that is currently rampant here in Europe: The State sells public companies that are extremely profitable to private corporations, because of unsubstantiated claims that "the State is a bad manager" and "the private markets do it more efficiently".

          It's all bullshit. When the State sells a public service, it loses the profits and gains two costs: Paying the privates a "rent" for the service and hundreds or thousands of unemployment benefits for the people that are fired. For the taxpayer, it's a disgrace: Prices go sky-high and service gets worse, so he now has to pay more fees for less, and keeps paying taxes to support the privates giving him this "public" service.

          And then the same private corporations that bought the public company bitch about how expensive the State is and how high the debt is. And they hire pundits and lobbyists to convince everyone that the State is a hog, so people don't see who the real hog is.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday May 09 2014, @12:21AM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday May 09 2014, @12:21AM (#41104) Homepage

        To add to what you said, situations like those outlined in the article are bound to happen when universities want to run themselves like for-profit business rather than institutions of higher-learning. For example, the president of San Diego State University is paid $400,000 dollars [latimes.com] a year, and in the UC system the administrators are paid way more [dailycal.org] and continually vote for their own pay increases as starving students become debt slaves paying for their education (Note: Janet Napolitano [ucop.edu] was given the presidency of the UC system despite having no experience in education, probably for her work as a Gestapo bootlicker and infringer of civil rights as former head of the DHS). There are plenty of educators who are equally, if not more, qualified; and willing to do the job for a quarter those amounts.

        You could argue that Tennessee State University in Backwater Bumfuckville would have to do something like sell patents to compensate for budget shortfalls, but that argument wears a little thin for an institution like Penn State which can afford to charge a little more for its tuition. How much are their regents paid?

        • (Score: 1, Redundant) by frojack on Friday May 09 2014, @12:23AM

          by frojack (1554) on Friday May 09 2014, @12:23AM (#41105) Journal

          starving students become debt slaves

          I've seen more than a few of these students, and none of them are starving.

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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday May 09 2014, @12:59AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Friday May 09 2014, @12:59AM (#41116) Homepage Journal

    What if all this intellectual property, based on research done at a public institution, were to end up in the hands of someone less interested in innovation than in hauling companies to court?

    Then the free market works, and those "patent trolls" are suddenly providing a valuable public service, by contributing money back to help fund actual research.

    Currently, patent trolls buy up patents that had no real-world uses nor value, and were really written to describe future products, without doing any actual work. Those require other companies to fund expensive R&D to make into real products, and assume they'll be able to get a nuisance payment from those same firms. For example, any one of us could write-up patents about self-driving cars, without doing any R&D to develop it, then in a few years, sue whoever does the R&D and brings it to market. All because the end product sounds vaguely like something we described in a patent, years earlier. It's the "brute force" method of filing patents.

    If they're actually paying for the R&D that developed the technology, the firms no longer bear any resemblance to those we call "patent trolls".

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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday May 09 2014, @03:29AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday May 09 2014, @03:29AM (#41143) Journal

    If only my university had patented the picture taking against a white background! We could have been as wealthy as Amazon, and higherly educated also!