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."
Re:It's competitive. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
What should happen is the creator/inventor should have a right to any patents as a success incentive, and whoever supplies funding should be entitled to the rest, and name their terms as Intel is doing; universities already get plenty of money for hosting the research, they should definitely be paid their costs but they get that -- who thinks any significant portion of the $2.5 million goes directly to the use of researchers anyways?
NOPE. It goes to the university, and the researcher gets the use of research budget which is a limited percentage of that, the rest of it goes to pay for 'facilities' and 'administrative costs' of the university. Every resource of the university's the researcher uses also gets charged from the budget -- for example, "lab hours", "hours of computing on the time sharing system", "megabytes of data transferred over the university's T1", etc, all those activities create artificial fees the prof has to pay, at exorbitant rates also, hello $1000/hour to use a small lab.... and you thought cell phones were expensive. The phrase "Hollywood Accounting" comes to mind
The research budget isn't an incentive or reward for research, and the researcher gets paid nothing -- unless they're an employee, then they might receive a salary; still, it's not really fair compensation given the value of their work. So yes, I'm saying the average University is the bad guy in this situation.