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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Maybe this helps students in the direct sense of modern academic career advancement, but I think it makes grad school a much more negative experience than it needs to be, and more broadly is a detriment to academic culture. I've encountered students that were forbidden from taking even a single class after they met (the very light) degree requirements, students who were not allowed to TA or volunteer mentor, students who had to sneak around just to finish analysis for a project they did with their previous lab, etc. This structure kills creativity and collaboration, and it results in a lot of graduates that have bare minimum teaching experience and no idea how to advise. Shocker that we've ended up with so many PIs that are really shitty managers!
A top neuro program in a major city will pay ~40K per year (and this is high relative to many other sciences). The rest of the compensation is health insurance and a meaningless "tuition" credit in order to register for a full "courseload" of research. Even at 40 hours per week that is shit compensation relative to what most of the students could be making elsewhere. The thesis project takes place over ~5 years, which is more than enough time to produce very good output on normal working hours. If students want to make their project their whole life fine, but as it stands there is way too much pressure coming from the top to do so, with minimal real benefits actually reaching the students.
> 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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].
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 École 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.
You’re confusing federal income tax with federal taxes in general. Google pays significant federal taxes any time they grant out stock or pay cash to employees/execs via payroll taxes.
There isn’t a way to avoid the taxation when that excess profit leaves the company somehow to shareholders. Even buybacks that cause stock appreciation lead to significant fed revenue when people sell.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s a nice story but it doesn’t make any sense. Corporations didn’t force universities to do anything. Quite the opposite.
Universities realized that they had a blank check in the form of student loans. Enticing students to study philosophy at $40k a year is a little difficult when there are no job prospects to pay back that loan.
So how do you get students to pay obscene tuition? Make the product appear to have good ROI. This is when universities started altering core curriculums and created new degrees to cover more applied topics that are useful for employment.
Businesses actually don’t care that much about college education (in SWE hiring it’s only relevant when the candidate has approximately no experience). This tide of shitty, expensive university was entirely brought on by the universities wanting to sustain obscene tuition growth.
This has nothing to do with businesses dumping training onto universities. This is purely greedy universities pretending they are a blessed training path to a good job to justify a price.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
(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.
I have first hand experience about Sweden, Germany, New Zealand and Australia.
In Sweden there is something called the teachers exemption which means even university teachers (as employees) will own their own IP, which is unusual (I think Italy has a similar provision).
For students they will in general own their own IP, that applies to graduate and undergraduate students.
The same rules for students apply to Australia and New Zealand, although there it depends on the scholarship/financing for graduate students. For large projects who finance PhD scholarships there is often a provision that IP is owned by the university (the same as employees), because there would often be a large number of co-inventors on patents for example. If there is to be some commercialisation you essentially want to avoid co- or unclear ownership.
For Germany I believe undergraduate students own their own IP, but graduate (PhD) students are typically university employees, so I'm not sure about the rules for them.
I've been told by university admin, that in general university agreements claiming rights on student IP would violate the law in most countries in Europe, because they would be agreements with a one-sided benefit, i.e. the student gives something up without getting something in return. This essentially the same reason why non-competes are generally not valid in Europe either, unless you are being paid while you can't work.
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.)
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".
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.
I sympathize, but if your students stop focusing on that, how do you propose they pay rent after graduation? Working retail? Bartending? Commuting ten hours a week to adjunct at three local community colleges? None of those options exactly leave a lot of time or energy for fundamental research
You can't just handwaive or long-sigh this away...you have to have concrete, realistic, and actionable answers to these questions....otherwise you are literally just complaining about children wanting to survive
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
This is still very generous. I know salaries are very low for PhD students but it is still a generous offer. I think my US university was 1/3 Uni, 1/3 Prof, 1/3 PhDs. They even handed stocks to a Post-doc with a 6 figure sum.
In an company you may get nothing or very very little.
Wiki: "In United States, however, an employee may have to sign over the rights to an invention without any special compensation. Germany has a law on employees' inventions providing strict rules concerning the transfer of rights to an invention to the employer. It also prescribes mandatory compensation of employees for inventions they make."
What is worse, that in some countries this also covers invention, unrelated to your field of employment. Wage-slave I guess.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
>but US society has culturally ingrained work ethic guilt that makes equality and leisure things that are not aggressively sought after consistently throughout society.
America's biggest problem are the Too Big to Fail™ + Too Big To Prosecute™ 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
A hypothetical company that didn't make anything, but generated high quality patents and licensed them out to other companies would be one thing. I don't know of many companies with that business model, probably because it's hard to generate useful inventions without actually building things / writing code and seeing what happens, but there might be a few out there.
A patent troll is a company that generates low quality patents. These are designed to be as broad a possible, so that said company can sue as many people as possible for infringement. Broad patents tend to contain very little information that could be useful in actually building working technology. It's like Leonardo daVinci takes out a patent on flying machines on the basis of his impractical drawings, and then sues the Wright brothers, who did all the hard work of actually designing a functional airplane. The patent troll doesn't even have to have a legally winnable case in order to make money, the point is just to create enough doubt that the target company decides it's easier to settle out of court, rather than waste a bunch of money in a lawsuit. In my opinion, such behaviour is pure rent-seeking.
Additional footnote: As a taxpayer in a country where the government gives significant funding to universities and university research, I absolutely do expect the universities to generate free knowledge for everyone (including companies).
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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?
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....
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Man... How it even possible to colapse unrelated things like economy stength with plain scientific paper(s) ??
But want an answer to why US is stronger/better in economy/industry ? a) US won WW2 and didn't have shit in goverment like comunism in Europe; b) US is continent size country - and in last decades it matters: more peoples, more resources, same culture; c) US had blessing from "In God we trust" and as is written that blessing spans 1k generations :)
Also US was/is active in hijacking whole industries, for example computers making.
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.
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.
>"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.
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?
>> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
However, you present it as a universal truth.
> 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)".
That's definitely bad. Do something about it. Sound the alarm. Newspapers love stories of public waste. Or don't, if you don't wanna – but don't portray this as being an inherent aspect of EU funding.
> 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.
Same as above.
> 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.
Now you seem to have digressed to a general rant about misuse of completely different EU budgets. Is your gripe just a general one about how your country is misusing EU funds? It doesn't seem very related to research funding.
Obviously I've touched a nerve there. I painted a small picture how the EU research grants are being misused and this being a just a part of bigger problem with EU money over here.
Did I claim anything about your country? Of course not. You might be upset that money is not well spent everywhere, and I hear you. Just don't pretend that those problems don't exist. Go flame somebody else please. Thanks.
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.
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.
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.