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by rayiner
3354 days ago
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> I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it. What's the economic logic behind this? In these situations, the government is just another early stage investor. If it demands terms that are too onerous, the good projects will go somewhere else, leaving the government with the ones that don't have better options. Or, you'll basically make government funded R&D all into dead ends, because nobody is going to bother to spend the money taking it from lab projects into commercialization. |
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Yet, somehow, we had almost a century of research and funding that included seminal things like radio, construction design and analysis, gigantic tools, tubes, transistors, etc. long before Bayh-Dole.
To be fair, I don't WANT government funding going into something that will make somebody money tomorrow. That's not what government research is supposed to be for, and it already has distorted "research" institutions into "funding" institutions where professors keep their best ideas close to the chest to go build a startup with. Besides, lots of people are willing to throw money at what looks immediately promising incrementally.
Nobody remembers them.
What everybody remembers are those rare times when funding flowed into things without any apparent use that magically transformed the entire technological landscape.