It's really outrageous.
University research publications behind paywalls, but paid for by us. Now patents, the development paid for by us, in the hands of trolls. And public universities involved.
This privatization is outrageous.
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.