Intel Mandates Universities Receiving Funds Not File Patents 223
sproketboy writes "Since January, four U.S. universities have agreed to host Intel Science and Technology Centers that will be funded at the rate of $2.5 million a year for five years. But wait, there's a catch: the company has made it a condition that in order to receive the millions, your university must open source any resulting software and inventions that come out of this research funding."
Intel is wrong... uh ... wait (Score:4, Insightful)
I like bashing faceless mega corporations as much as the next guy, but this seems to be ... a benign act.
Re:It's competitive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I predict (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's competitive. (Score:5, Insightful)
You get to a point where you realize that as soon as you spend a shitload of money trying to corner the market on something, the time you've wasted ends up giving the competition a leg-up in a new area you SHOULD have been spending that time and energy working on.
Just open source fucking everything and use it to make money on support. There is no gross margin in hardware anymore, and none in the perceivable future -- and Intel knows it.
NSF Next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intel is wrong... uh ... wait (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse than that ... it's almost designed to improve the overall state of the art, without Intel gaining exclusive access to the research, thereby making it possible for just anybody to gain from this. I'm outraged.
I mean, that's almost communism. No patents? No royalties? No licensing fees? No lawyers? Just good old fashioned university research opened up for all to see?
Do you realize how badly this could cripple the economy? ;-)
(Kidding aside ... I wonder if the academic journals would muck with this somehow. They take copyright of the papers, for instance.)
I do applaud Intel for this ... when I first read this, I thought the string was they they get the patents. This really is funding open research.
Re:It's competitive. (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't prevent AMD benefiting from the useful technology, it just prevents the patents. That's the ideal situation. They're providing an incentive to invent things without the temporary monopoly.
Agreed. I see nothing at all wrong with this restriction.
Given that Intel funded them they could have asked for ownership, but instead asked for Open Sourcing any developments. Good on Intel.
Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.
I simply can't get incensed about this. Its a clever way to give back to society something bigger than you have in your own inventory.
Re:If the university doesn't patent it... (Score:4, Insightful)
As others have commented, first to file doesn't apply if the research has been made public. Since universities rely on publish or perish, the most likely scenario is that anything produced through Intel funding will be considered prior art when an outside party then tries to patent it. Assuming that the software is GPL'd, then it must include the GPL required headers, etc. So, if somebody does try to usurp it, then the university can sue them for license violations.
What Intel is proposing is how Universities used to operate prior to the 1980s. Somebody did research, presented a paper at a conference, others picked it up and expanded on that research and then presented at another conference, etc., etc. There were no patents and information flowed relatively freely and knowledge expanded. That is how the university system was designed to work.
Come the 1980s and tax law changes, universities focused more on monetarizing their research to fund other things (not necessarily a bad thing), but the way it played out was that the patents were then sold to other companies who then used them to build war chests and limit competition.
Intel is every bit in its right to insist that if you want to use their money for research, these are the stipulations. If a university doesn't like having to make the fruits of the research public and available to all, they are free to use the money from somebody else.
It is interesting to note that the biggest advances in science, at least in the US, came under systems in which the information was freely shared. Since keeping research private and seeking patents, the US has gone from being a leader int he scientific community to a follower. But at least somebody made a bunch of money of them.
Intel's motivation is obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's decided that the advantages of patenting have started to flow less and less to companies like Intel, and more to patent trolls. Intel is not the bad guy here.
Therefore, it is in Intel's interest to fund research in areas it may want to commercialize, and simultaneously preclude patenting by insisting on open publication and no patenting.
In this scenario, the entity with the most money (i.e. somebody like Intel) wins if they have sufficient drive.
More realistically, they want to preclude the people funded by Intel to set up a startup on their own, one whose primary asset is the people and the patent estate. This way Intel can hire them as ordinary employees who are impoverished postdocs instead of having to first buy them out and then hire them.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)