Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 11:23:24 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: cjclark@alum.mit.edu, Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it>, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <3BC7351C.9744234E@mindspring.com> References: <000601c15084$87edd360$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <1002663600.3bc36eb096ee5@webmail.neomedia.it> <20011009231343.C387@blossom.cjclark.org> <1002731960.3bc479b899603@webmail.neomedia.it> <20011010140126.M387@blossom.cjclark.org> <20011010233539.G83192@lpt.ens.fr> <3BC53F53.967C60E7@mindspring.com> <20011011095336.A475@lpt.ens.fr> <3BC5592C.1E8734F6@mindspring.com> <20011011122205.D17422@lpt.ens.fr>
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Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > I'm not sure of the numbers, but in the "boom years" after the war, > universities got much of their funding from the government: some from > the NSF, some from places like NASA. It was driven by technological > competition with the USSR, and by military desires (the development of > the atomic bomb convinced many that theoretical physics was the way to > go...) but whatever the motivations, it had a good effect, for US > industry in particular. The funding didn't conflict with the idea > that university research is for the public good and should not be > appropriated for private profit. Today, that idea is indeed being > questioned more and more, One of the biggest threats to this is that what was formerly placed in the public domain, as far as liability laws in the U.S. allow it, is now being placed under licenses like the GPL, where the information is not usable by everyone. > but I'd find it quite distressing if universities started > regarding patent portfolios as more important than sharing of > knowledge. It depends on the patents, but most Universities license their patents fairly cheaply, or license them for "$1 plus other valuable considerations", which usually amount to "we will hit you up for donations, if you make it big". The MIT patents, in particular, were used as a threat to USL over the USL vs. UCB lawsuit. Also note that patents, by definition, share the knowledge; if it weren't for the patent reform forced on the U.S. system by treaty, patents would be 14 years instead of 20 years. Yes, for many fields of study, that's too long a time, but for getting new drugs through the FDA approval process, it's nearly not long enough. Patents are also usable without fee for the purpose of research. So your complaint here seems to be that they do not permit commercial expolitation for too long a time, which I find a strange argument from your side of the fence... > > The transistor was never patented; this is because it was > > disclosed more than a year before anyone thought it might > > end up being anything more than a curiosity. Bell Labs > > has done a lot of that sort of thing. > > And you can argue that the benefits have been immense. Because > the transistor was never patented, it was picked up and played > with everywhere, especially by the Japanese. Some would argue that this is the major lynchpin in the foreign portion of the U.S. national debt. > Bell Labs didn't really lose much either: they got a Nobel, > fame, etc. These rewards are insufficient for the effort involved. > If they had tried to hold tightly to their invention, they may > have got a few royalties, but the uses to which it was put > within the next decade would probably not have materialised so > quickly. On the contrary: first, the commercial application of trasistor technology didn't follow until well after the invention, so the window there was incredibly small: much smaller than a decade. Second, there is _always_ more than one way to solve a problem, and if that avenue was blocked, simply knowing that such a thing was possible at all would have spurred investigation into other areas. Such investigation was effectively supressed by the _lack_ of a patent. So there is no telling how much further along we would be, had there been a barrier to the transistor, but not to the idea of a transistor itself (which was not a patentable thing, in any case: only the invention itself was patentable). > My point of view is this: when a company develops a new innovation, it > *already* has an advantage over its competitors; it can be first to > market, it can strengthen its brand image, it can stay ahead of its > competitors. However, with strong patent protection, the company can > rest on its patents and try to earn revenues by squeezing the rest of > the world (like Rambus tried, unsuccessfully, to do). The problem with this theory is that if we take it to heart, then we will no longer invest in research that takes longer to complete than the smallest possible time to market window, since we will not be able to recover costs fully before our competitors are able to come out with their own version of our invention. Therefore, we will have a research investment debt that they do not have, and thus they will be able to operate on smaller margins and drive us out of business by undercutting our prices to the point where we can no longer compete. If you want someone to spend 10 years on important research, then they need 10 years of protection. A 3 year protection window would satisfy almost all software research, for example. A 20 year window is more appropriate to something like the laser, or pharmaceuticals -- the former because of the magnitude of the innovations, and the latter because of the amount of the window which will be chewed up by governmental process following the patent application. > Compare with food products: people buy Kelloggs, or Kraft, for the > brand name, not because of superior quality. There is no patent or > other IP protection for cheese or corn flakes. Actually, there was on corn flakes, for quite a while... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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