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Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

If the doctrine of patent exhaustion is undermined, I can only imagine how the public's ability to use general purpose computers might be restricted. Possibly the only unencumbered computer I own is an 8088 that hasn't been powered on for well over a decade.

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Was looking through our alumni magazine this weekend. This section [0] really caught my attention. Massive props to the Prof. That said, seriously nice donation.

"In 1984, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)’s donation of $24 million provides the University of Waterloo with eight new VAX machines — on the condition that work created using the machines would be the property of DEC.

Wes Graham, a professor of computer science, stopped the shipment until the company agreed to Waterloo’s policy of leaving intellectual property in the hands of its inventors."

[0] https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/fall-2016/feature/60-years-inn...

The irony of that is most universities make their students sign a clause stating that all IP generated by the student for the duration of their studies is the property of the university.

I would be very surprised if the University of Waterloo doesn't have a similar arrangement.

Well color me impressed, the University of Waterloo indeed does not make claim to student IP [1].

[1] https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization-off...

Waterloo is pretty good in encouraging their students to pursue and monetise their ideas. They quite fancy being able to brand themselves as a university preferred by accelerators and incubators.

At University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a student owns the IP to his inventions that are not part of funded research.

And where does the bulk of that funding come from...? ;-)

Grants, university funded research is not the same thing as curriculum paid for by tution and non specific funding sources.

I don't know if it's accurate to say 'most.' I've attended and worked with many universities over the years, and in my experience the only time a uni will make that claim is if it was a result of university funded research, or as part of a large scale collaborative process.

I wonder if their is an index somewhere that would list universities that blanketly attempt to claim IP developed by students independently.

Another Canadian university story: the University of Saskatchewan has a fairly decent agreement. Faculty, staff, and grad students (but not undergrad students) make an agreement to assign any patents coming from their research to the university, and the university in return gives back 50% of the commercialization of the patent back to the researcher.

Additionally, if the university decides it doesn't want to commercialize a patent, it will return ownership to the original inventor.

This came up in my MSc program, when I was considering commercializing some of the software that I wrote while doing my research. Likely not patentable (the university's IP lawyer agreed). My supervisor felt he deserved partial ownership, but I had written all of it on my own. The university's lawyer basically told us that since I was the sole author of the work, and the university has no copyright assignment agreement, it was all mine to do with as I pleased.

Yeah, that's my biggest concern. It's already hard to buy a PC without a copy of Windows. Imagine if you couldn't even buy a PC without relinquishing the right to switch your OS later. Or if you had to agree to leave the bloatware installed. One could come up with all sorts of horrible things if SCOTUS rules in favor of the printer company.

Or even specialized computers: the engine computer in your car might come with some license or restriction preventing you from transferring the engine computer to the next purchaser. That would require the next purchaser of your car to pay a few hundred dollars for a newly licensed engine computer.

The corrupted legal system seems like an academic concern, in the worst case necessitating a Faraday cage. Benevolently backdoored firmware, on the other hand...

I hedge by archiving my old motherboards/laptops on a shelf.

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