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Helsing posted:So much of our medical research is conducted in public universities or drawing upon public funds in one way or another, and of course the enforcement of patents is an almost entirely public expense. Yet the result of this system is to massively inflate the cost of life saving drugs that end up costing many hundreds or thousands of times their actual cost of production. What's the proportion of R&D costs met with public funds vs. private funds? Just saying it's conducted in public universities doesn't mean much: the drug companies could easily be footing the bill. In addition, many of those public universities own patents: what's the percentage of funds extracted by patents that go back to public universities and how favorably/unfavorably does that compare to the funds they put in? I tend to see a lot of these sorts of arguments but I don't know that I've ever seen the numbers to back up the conclusion people are expected to draw from them.
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Dec 9, 2013 19:47
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:You may have known that the IP superstructure was an exploitive system of rent extraction on behalf of a parasitic bourgeoisie but did you know: it's also patriarchal as hell and excludes women both epistemologically and empirically? Check it out! This writer shifts between arguments so often - frequently within a single paragraph - it's virtually impossible to figure out what the author is actually arguing on any level more detailed than your summary. I can't even figure out if it's just bad writing masking a legitimate point or even if there are are legitimate points or if it's just a stream of unconnected thoughts on IP and gender. In any case, if you wanted to check out that subject I sure wouldn't start here. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Dec 9, 2013 |
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Dec 9, 2013 22:20
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Kalman posted:Except that that patent doesn't cover that? Every claim I see on there is an overly wordy way to describe anything a computer could possibly be doing in response to the request. I really don't see any limitations in there.
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Dec 10, 2013 01:02
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NJ Deac posted:That's not to say that there aren't lovely patents that get through the office due to idiot/lazy/overworked examiners, but it's very difficult to just look at a patent quickly and say "this is a garbage patent", because interpreting these documents often takes a fair amount of both legal and technical understanding (perhaps this is part of the problem!). Oh sure, but I read the patent - and the part Kalman quoted - and I'm not seeing it. Kalman seems to think the restrictions are self-evident. I don't agree, and from looking at the description of code I see something similar to what Paul MaudDib sees: something that looks complex and limited but is describing utterly ordinary mechanisms of how any program would work. I could easily be wrong but I'd like to know precisely where those limits are. The other problem, of course, is that I'm both a lawyer and fairly well versed in technology and I'm not seeing the limits. That tends to get at another problem with patent law: how in the blazes is a loving jury of twelve random people, lead by a judge who probably doesn't have any experience in the area, going to decide? That makes even a lovely infringement case so dangerous.
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Dec 10, 2013 01:44
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Buffer posted:Ahahahahahahahaha, are you loving serious? Government doesn't fund research to make a profit. Post better or don't post, thanks.
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Dec 10, 2013 01:51
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Buffer posted:At university of corporate headquarter state a start-up is formed by a professor, group of professors, and/or potentially a few students to commercialize their primarily NSF funded research. The university grants license to or transfers the IP registered and developed over the course of many years via their TLO in exchange for equity, trading talent and IP developed by that talent in exchange for a stake in the resulting company. A few years pass and an outside company, say a prominent tech company named after a fruit for example, buys out that company for relative peanuts(as demonstrated by say, a later lawsuit in which the NSF-funded IP alone was valued at billions) in order to acquire the talent and IP. They then use the acquired IP or license to sue the poo poo out of someone. For all of this the researchers get a relatively small payout, in the millions, the government gets nothing, the university gets a few million, the lawyers get many millions, the technology company named after a fruit gets awarded billions, and consumers of the resulting product ultimately foot the bill by inches for what basically comes down to research they had already payed for. What's going on here is someone makes a bad business decision. Given the bad business decision hurt everyone involved, it clearly wasn't an attempt to screw the university or really had anything to do with the university.
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Dec 10, 2013 23:13
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Buffer posted:Nobody set out to screw anyone, malice isn't required for you to end up with a perverse outcome that hurt everyone you'd want the system to reward. And that's before you get into any consequences of requiring that largely non-profit research institutions, which are ostensibly doing the research it isn't business savvy for the private sector to do, also be business savvy. Nothing you've described is the result of any IP laws. The bad outcome for the university is that someone sold an asset they had an interest in for pennies on the dollar. This is not a flaw of the IP system and nothing you've said remotely suggests it is. There's also absolutely nothing to suggest it was the university that was not business savvy: it is the people running the business who made the error. And they lost out quite a lot as well so like I said, nothing here is remotely the fault of IP or the University's actions.
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Dec 11, 2013 01:09
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Kalman posted:Not that screeds in favor of central planning aren't interesting and all, but how do you plan to set the value of a given advance before, you know, you have the advance in hand? Particularly when it isn't necessarily going to be an advance that's predictable? That's asking the wrong question. The patent system exists to promote the advance of technology (at least under American law which is what we're generally discussing here) rather than awarding the inventors the value of their invention through a quasi moral-rights theory. We do not need to worry about setting the value we award once the advance is made correctly, we need to worry about setting the incentives before the advance is made to make the advance correctly. Obviously, the post-discovery award is the incentive so they're somewhat linked but you've still got the wrong end.
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Dec 13, 2013 01:23
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Kalman posted:Actually, we file patents for tiny start ups all the time, and we are expensive. Smaller firms do patent filings for start ups far more frequently than we do. Almost all start ups file for protection in the start up phase because without it, they can't succeed - someone else will just copy their technology. That doesn't actually respond to "the vast majority" of patents are filed by large institutions. It's actually implicit in the statement that a large majority of patents are filed by large institutions (because that statement implies there's some filed by non-large institutions).
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Dec 13, 2013 01:26
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Munkeymon posted:Engineering actually makes physical objects that can be directly compared to each other, though. Software is just a set of data transformation instructions that could be represented in wildly different ways, even right on down to the machine-interpreted code. A patent isn't on the specific physical object you invented. There's no real difference in patenting a chemical process or a software process, for example.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:49
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Munkeymon posted:Can you cite an example because I can't think of anything that's hardware but acts like software. Electronic engineering is basically just programming in a different medium at times.
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Dec 13, 2013 23:03
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KernelSlanders posted:Why is that holy poo poo? That seems a pretty good ruling unless I missed the point completely (I read it kind of fast). If you can do the computation in your head, saying do that on a computer isn't patentable. He's saying it's a very good ruling for an examiner supporting rejecting something as unpatentable subject matter.
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Dec 19, 2013 15:27
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KernelSlanders posted:I'm not talking about the copyright of the 3d model itself. What I mean is let's say person A makes a model of a dohicky that infringes on company X's patent and uploads it to website run by person B. Person C downloads the model (with permission from person A) and makes prints it. Who's infringing? This is a little tricky because you're asking a patent question, not a copyright question. For patents, the information on how to build the patented item is public domain information (it must be disclosed to get the patent) - you're just not allowed to use it without a license during the patent period. That's different from copyright where it's the copying and distributing that's not allowed. I think this would be a very fact-specific case about exactly what the person distributing the model was doing and why.
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Jan 6, 2014 04:57
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