Universities have turned over hundreds of patents to patent trolls
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WARF is an enormous success at UW and last year alone contributed over $100 million back to the university.
The intention is more of "hey entrepreneurs, we've got this technology developed in academia - if you see a business model based on this, talk to us so you can use it."
Of note, if you follow the 'technologies - information technology - software' path, you'll note that none of these are actually patents. They're listed as "technologies" instead.
There do appear to be some patents listed... things like low profile, ultra wide band antenna and wideband transceiver for antenna array.
All that said, one of the distinctions between the patent troll and the warf is that of "the warf is seeking business partnerships for people to use technologies, inventions, and patents developed at the university of madison" and the troll is "buying patents from one party and suing another party for royalties." The business model for the two is completely different.
It's at least Triple taxation.
Quadruple taxation for the underpaid grad students working on the research to get their degree?
I'm curious if these represent cases where the universities sold patents to practicing entities, and then they got shuffled over to trolls in liquidation sales or re-orgs?
Even if we accept patents, then you can be required to partner with a manufacturer within a certain period of time. This kind of thing might already exist if we compare it to the record labels for turning copywritten songs into fortunes for labels and authors. Similar middle-men would show up plus DIY kits, consultants, and advice on doing it yourself. The risks you face wouldn't be much different from the current market where trolls like Intellectual Ventures convince broke patent holders to give it to them for pennies using pressure of their bargaining power then make millions off them in law suits.
I'd also ban the assigning of patents to corporations; they would only be owned by the original people who filed them. So corporations could only benefit from those patents as long as the patent-holders were employees (or at least one of the patent-holders if there's multiple), by being allowed to use the patent license-free.
>I understand that we can't just ban the selling of patents
Why not? We can ban anything we want as long as it's not unconstitutional. The question is if a ban of something has more negative effects than positive. I don't see how it would here.
It is a long way from a patentable idea to a marketable product. So what happens when the patent originator lacks the competencies or capital to produce at scale? If selling a patent was banned, both the innovator and society would be denied any benefit from the innovation.
If you're a California resident, UC is a deal compared to private and out-of-state public options. UC guarantees free tuition (grant, not loan) for in-state students with family income under $80,000.
On the other hand, out of state and international students pay full ticket and subsidize the rest of the students.
The real rip-off for UC students is in the large class sizes and inexperienced lecturers and grad students at the podium. Large research institutions are having a lot of trouble ensuring quality of education as enrollments increase and student bodies diversify.
IV's business is much more than that. Besides buying outside commercially developed patents (similar to what a troll does), they also employ scientists and engineers directly to develop new things that IV can patent, and they fund outside researchers in exchange for patent rights.
At least some of the university patents IV has acquired were through such deals, where IV provides funding for the academic research that leads to the patent, and then IV gets commercialization rights to the patent, with the university getting a cut of any licensing fees IV gets from those patents.
There is a long history of innovation happening from universities spinning-off patented technology into private companies. E.g. what John Hennessy did with MIPS. It's a great model. If you get rid of it, you'd turn universities into ivory-tower ghettos where researchers would only go if they had no desire to make money.
It's a school, not a business. The idea that there's supposed to be any equity is novel, to put it mildly.
Your analogy would make more sense if it described a hypothetical VC who puts in 100% of the money in exchange for no equity at all, because the company is holding a gun to his head.
Money is money. From the perspective of the incentives of the hypothetical researcher, it's irrelevant where the money comes from. If the government demands 100% equity in return for investment, it just becomes the least competitive VC on the market, doomed to fund the least compelling projects.
> The people in universities should be happy to have a cushy, tenured academic job; people who have a serious "desire to make money" (beyond that of a professor's salary, which is both good and very stable) don't belong at universities at all, they should be working in the private sector.
Strongly disagree. One of the reasons the U.S. has hands-down the best engineering universities in the world is because of the fluid boundary between academia and the private sector. Filling universities with people who just want a cushy academic job is a great way to make academic research completely irrelevant.
That is not to say that all DARPA and NSF-funded research should be patented. To the extent the research is more fundamental and less applied it shouldn't be. But DARPA and NSF fund both theoretical and applied research and so do universities.
If the government demands 100% equity then research that can support itself will be funded by the private sector and the government will be left funding research the private sector won't because the benefits are diffuse and the transaction costs of licensing would be prohibitive, and foundational research that won't bear fruit for several years, and high-cost high-risk high-reward research that the private sector won't fund because individual private sector entities don't have the requisite scale to survive the failure of a high-cost high-risk investment.
Which is as it should be. Why does the government need to be wasting tax dollars on research the private sector would do on its own?
Even for research the private sector might fund anyway, all it means is that the government to be competitive would have to pay the researchers more up front rather than after the fact with a patent, which could still bring about an efficiency improvement by eliminating the patent prosecution and licensing overhead.
> One of the reasons the U.S. has hands-down the best engineering universities in the world is because of the fluid boundary between academia and the private sector.
There is a difference between not patenting something and preventing the original researchers from benefiting from it. Not having a patent doesn't prevent them from commercializing the research, it just doesn't give them a monopoly -- they still have the knowhow and first to market advantage if they want it.
They could even patent the commercialization itself if that wasn't funded by the government, provided it's enough of an improvement over the now-prior-art government-funded research to be awarded a patent. And if it isn't then why should they have one?
1. I would even go so far as to argue that for top tier institutions that teaching isn't even their primary function.
I think that tenure is itself pretty much the most awesome benefit possible: guaranteed employment for life. Do they really need more?
If you want to privatize profits, you need to privatize the costs too. Don't ask me to fund something and not be able to share in the profits.
The plan you describe would lead to far less fruitful basic research and a poorer world as a result.
I've never met anyone who actually believed in "privatize the profits, socialize the losses", but here you are.
And your claims about basic research and a poorer world have no evidence whatsoever to back them up. Universities have not always been this way.
What I don't see is:
(1) Some control over professors running outright businesses, and once tenured, putting much of their effort into those businesses, while still drawing senior-level pay. I don't claim this is common. But it is a major moral hazard. (2) Little compensation for graduate students whose contributions range from scutwork to the critical innovation involved. They have to execute the technology in the lab -- in industry, this is most prized, not "the idea." What mechanism is their for fairness here? Oh, right, they're getting a free education. OK. But what if the university earns $10's of millions of dollars off their labor? (3) When professors innovate in active commercial markets, rather than in really bleeding edge areas, there is an intrinsic unfairness. In essence, the government, through its funding, is picking winners.
It is a defense if the overall society is improved. If professors get rich, that's also fine.
If this is true, should these patents be exclusive domain of these school's to profit from exclusively? It seems to me that selling patents to these litigious entities impedes progress that might otherwise benefit the same tax paying public that helped underwrite at least some of the research.
Am I looking at this wrong?
Maybe there are lots of other nuances that my oversimplification doesn't account for. I would be curious to hear what those are if so.
What if the school first sold it to a non-patent-troll 3rd party, and then that 3rd party transferred it to IV?
Is there a way to follow the history of a particular patent?