It's a fairly natural outgrowth of the pressure (since 80s) to run (public) universities "more like a business". Funding was cut and restructured, a professional class of management moved in, and universities were encourages/mandated to look for new sources of revenue. One of the common variants of this was to develop fairly aggressive "technology transfer" offices. The idea being that IP was being developed, but not monetized. It hasn't been super successful, for a bunch of reasons.

Do you have any sources one could read into?

Look up the history of the Bayh-Dole act.

Cheers mate, I love reading about history.

What is unpalatable is the extractive industry thinking they can get by on goodwill.

Why don't we force mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their profit and pollution-generating enterprise, and let that money flow to institutions that do the research to clean it up?

I agree with you that we force the mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their process. What I disagree with is then adding on an additional cost just to pad the pockets of the University.

I would be totally cool if the EPA said, "This works great, all extractive industries creating 'produced water' must use this process to clean up that water to safe water standards."

But what Purdue wants is to have these companies to both have to do this, and have to pay Purdue a 'tax' on the process just because one of their graduate students and a professor there thought it up. That 'rent seeking' model takes good ideas an kills them. Digital cash which could have taken off in the 90s was completely killed by patent holders unwilling to license patents for less than extortionate rates. The RSA algorithm, similarly held hostage.

Purdue would get much more goodwill if they did not patent the process, and it would be easier for the EPA to mandate it because doing so would not disproportionately benefit a third party economically.

I disagree. I think they should patent it & make a profit. I also think the government should get a cut of that revenue if they provided any kind of grant. That rewards tax payers for supporting policies that invest in fundamental research.

The government can, if necessary, use that revenue for incentives to encourage deployment; for example to drop the upfront cost in the short-term to incentivize adoption. Use market-based solutions with aligned incentives instead of trying to pretend there is no market or that incentives aren't misaligned.

As a thought exercise, compare how much you have benefited from the gcc tools suite being "free and unpatented" versus having it cost you every time you used it.

This isn't as a bad a comparison as you might imagine. There are "rewards" and there are "rewards." It is in the governments interest to spend tax dollars to make the country better for everyone. If they give Purdue grant money to do the research and this process results, then they make it both free to implement and required, then the result is a "reward" where there is less polluted water out there, everywhere.

Similarly when someone spends their time making gcc better and giving way that investment, everyone gets a better compiler. So they have invested a bit of their time and the community as a whole has benefited.

Because they are pursuing a patent on this process, I predict it will never be used for the next 20 years because it doesn't add any "value" for the people who should use it.

>If they give Purdue grant money to do the research and this process results, then they make it both free to implement and required, then the result is a "reward" where there is less polluted water out there, everywhere.

This is pure fantasy. Grant money is scarce and drying up everywhere. Not two weeks ago, this administration put a $1 billion dollar cut to the National Science Foundation[1] on the table.

Because they are pursuing a patent on this process, revenue generated by the licensure of this product will flow to the institutions supporting that research. Companies can then be incentivized to pursue licensure.

The scientist that discovered insulin, Sir Frederick Banting, forfeited his right to profit from the patenting of his discovery[2], and yet we have companies to this day restricting supply to wring hundreds of dollars per dose out of patients that depend on the drug. The patent isn't the problem.

> As a thought exercise, compare how much you have benefited from the gcc tools suite being "free and unpatented" versus having it cost you every time you used it.

You present a false dichotomy: that GCC tools be free/unpatented vs having them cost every person on every usage. Just yesterday we saw posts on HN describing the struggle of open source community sustainability and undue burdens on maintainers of free software.

When multi-billion dollar corporations depend on free and open source software, they should be made to contribute in some way.

1. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/433507-trump-pro...

2. http://www.cdnmedhall.org/inductees/sir-frederick-banting

> The patent isn't the problem.

what in your opinion is the root problem?

[edit] formatting

Lack of social shame/absence of moral pressure.

I'd likely contribute something to gcc, so I'd be getting some money back when everyone else uses it.

You could likely fund openSSL properly if people had to pay some minimal tax on it, that could be offset by contributing

I don't like it either, because as you say it locks up useful tech. But I'm not sure it's any more rent seeking than private research. Purdue is public yes, but in most states even public universities receive much less than 50% of their funding from state and federal sources.

I still believe in some of the benefits of patents too though. What I'd like to see are compulsory licensing rules w/ ceilings imposed on the fees. And some sort of "public good" exemption for things like this that limit patent length even further.

> What I disagree with is then adding on an additional cost just to pad the pockets of the University.

Reminder that Universities like Purdue are non-profits. While this doesn't mean they spend all their money wisely, it isn't just going to some billionaire CEO, and a very large portion is funding additional research.