Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?"

On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?

On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?



Yeah, my experience is the patent gets licenced to some private entity that then squeezes a profit of it. The public sure doesn’t “benefit”.

I’d prefer to see such funding going to state universities, not private ones.


Under the Bayh-Dole Act state universities do the exact same thing. They patent their research and license it to private companies. Their discoveries are no more or less open to the public than with private universities.


The public benefits by access to treatments that wouldn't exist had the research not been done.

On the other hand I agree that research funded by tax dollars should not be patented and should be available to all.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: