Re:The death of corporate research labs
by amelius on Thursday May 21, 2020 @09:34AM
(#23258100)
That sounds like a good thing, but realize that some day industry will build an application based on your ideas and patent the result. Patents are a monopoly on technology, and working for a university, probably the last thing you had in mind was that other people would monopolize your inventions so that their use would become limited.
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University labs are generally good at dealing with patents. Researchers do generate patents where it makes sense, and the processes are set up such that the university gets some ownership with the option for the researchers to transfer the knowledge to companies e.g. student graduates and founds a startup with the patent as foundational IP. This is all intentional and it's one of the ways for the labs to do their job of disseminating their discoveries and transfer knowledge to industry.
Still, patents are a way to provide exclusive access to technology, to those who pay. That's not something I personally would like to see happening to my inventions if I'd work at a university. It's also not how universities used to operate, traditionally.
Further, I feel that if it's paid for by the public, it belongs to the public.