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Comment by jb775 | Hacker News Reader

> The idea for the lozenge design originated with Deniz Yucesoy, a graduate student in the UW’s Genetically Engineered Materials Science and Engineering Center who received a $100,000 Amazon Catalyst grant

This grad-student/researcher just handed over a multi-million dollar business to Amazon in exchange for $100k towards the research. Why on Earth would anyone sign over 100% ownership of their idea, just to be able to test their idea? I guess he thought it would look good on his resume as begs a company for a job after graduation?

Who owns the IP if I join Amazon Catalyst?[1]

Amazon Catalyst is a place to see your idea come to fruition without the risk of starting a company on your own. As such, the IP that is developed in Amazon Catalyst is property of Amazon.[1]

[1] https://catalyst.amazon.com/

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If you're an academic researcher, you probably don't care as much about the ownership of IP when compared to a potential to see your work get used and to build a reputation as a competent person in your field.

Also, the work wouldn't necessarily exist without the funding.

Well, we are talking about a possibly multi-million dollar product here. If Amazon were a bit less predatory perhaps keep 99% of the IP?

Amazon is a modern day Dutch East India Company. There’s no reason for them not to be predatory, given that they wield so much power.

Or British East India Company. Not like either wasn't predatory back in its heyday.

Good point, you’re right on that.

I completely agree. Hopefully them doing this sparks the same initiative for other companies. Perhaps with some competition for talent the terms would be better.

What is a reasonable survivorship bias rate? If Amazon invested at a point when this was <1% likelihood of making it to market In a commercially successful venture, then their initial investment would work out to be charity for society.

This is, indeed, often the point of commercial partnerships for universities - getting what you want to see out into the world.

I don't remember the licensing terms for Catalyst specifically, but they are fairly aggressive, as far as these things go, to my recollection.

The website for Catalyst at UW appears to have different IP terms:

> For the avoidance of doubt as between Sponsor and Participants/Teams, all Submissions created by Participants/Teams will remain the property of the Participant/Team except to the extent a Participant/Team incorporated elements in their Submission owned by Sponsor, but the Competition Entities will have the rights to use the Submissions described herein. By submitting a Submission in this Competition, each Participant/Team warrants and represents that he or she owns, or otherwise has the right to use, all of the intellectual and industrial property rights in and to the Submission. Further, each Participant/Team hereby grants the Competition Entities a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze your Submission in connection with this Competition.

TLDR: It's your IP, but we can use it in connection with this Competition.

https://catalyst.amazon.com/archive/programs/uw/#rules

That doesnt appear to be a grant at all then! Are government or nonprofit grants ever attached to IP ownership terms?

Usually the IP goes to the employer (i.e. the university) rather than the individual researcher.

what if there’s more to an idea than how much money you personally can extract from it?

Theres more to an idea than how much a billionaire can trick you to part with it too though.

Yeah, how altruistic of him to hand the idea over to a group of bloodsucking capitalists that'll use it to extract as much profit from the world as possible.

There is no way this is not copied by Indian pharmacies in a whim, IP is nothing these days.

As long as it's disclosed beforehand, I don't see any problem with that. It's not like Amazon coerced the student into the contract: if they had a better funding opportunity they'd obviously have gone for it. This is the best deal they could get and Amazon was also obviously taking a risk: for every successful project, there are hundreds that don't get anywhere.

You can't pay rent with the hope of success.

> multi-million dollar business

That is not a business, just an idea. The value of ideas (unproven, unimplemented) is ZERO. The fact that someone was willing to pay $100k for it is absolutely amazing and a huge service to the society.

This is absolutely wrong. Especially when the formulation of the idea depends on extremely advanced knowledge of the topic.

Prove me wrong. Try selling an idea and let us know how much money you got for it.

You are making an extraordinary claim here (that an idea founded on a significant amount of study and prior experimentation is worthless). It seems to me that it's a little strange to ask someone else to disprove you when you haven't really made your own point of view plausible.

Do I really need to prove that you can starve with a million ideas in your head? That everyone around has countless ideas and it's impossible to know which ones can create value without spending time and money to try to develop them?

I think the extraordinary claim is to pretend to know the value of an idea upfront. Very few people (Venture Capitalists, business investors, etc) try that and they fail more often than they succeed.

Show me someone who can reliably predict the idea success rate and I will show you a billionaire!

You're arguing a different point than everyone else, so it makes sense that things don't make sense to you.

That may very well be. I am arguing against GGGP's implied point that is an inherently bad move to sell an (unproven, untested, undeveloped) idea for $100k. My argument is sustained by the general accepted worldwide idea market value and the very observation that the idea owner, the one that must have been the best informed about said value of that idea, decided to sell.

In short, I am saying: "He must have known better than us dumb commenters on the Internet, we must respect his decision, he could've done a lot worse."

What point are you arguing?

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