[btilly]

I bet that the money that they get will largely go to lawyers, administration, and increased efforts around finding/litigating patents on current research.

I am extremely dubious that it will result in research that advances the state of science. Science flourishes best when you share results and hypotheses early and often, then get feedback/inspire others. But that type of communication threatens patents, so inspires people to put their research into black boxes until the legal paperwork has been filed.

[tooltalk]

what "black box" are you talking about? Caltech is a major research institution -- their invention was published and widely cited (according to Google, by 840+ papers), so others clearly benefitted from their work. It seems only major tech companies making billions by selling wireless gears didn't know about it.

[staticautomatic]

Patent litigation is expensive but you would hardly need a billion-dollar war chest to monetize a portfolio with a successful litigation history. Between contingency fee arrangements and litigation financing, you could essentially print money with little downside risk, albeit with far less upside potential than if you paid sticker price to litigate.

[shoguning]

This judgment sounds big but it can be appealed and Caltech may never collect a penny. A $200 million judgment against Apple was thrown out less than 2 years ago [1].

Most tech transfer programs at universities don't break even, they usually lose money [2]. This is even more insane than it sounds because the research is already paid for. Tech transfer deals don't even cover the university lawyers.

If the patents were so valuable why wouldn't the universities be starting unicorns left and right with actual investors or actual revenue? Instead they try to get the money through litigation.

It's sad (and a waste of money) that universities have become fixated on being get-rich-quick patent trolls instead of doing transformational research.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/&apple-wins-reversal-in-univ... [2] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/09/the-changing-face-of-u...

[tooltalk]

Sure, if VirnetX's ordeal with Apple is any indication, Apple/Broadcomm would drag out the suit as long as they could -- and I predict that this can last 5-7 years easily.

>If the patents were so valuable why wouldn't the universities be starting unicorns left and right with actual investors or actual revenue? Instead they try to get the money through litigation.

Not sure where you are coming from, but there are many University research tech spinoff's in the US, especially in the SF Bay area.

[njarboe]

Yea, there is this company called Google. Stanford licensed them the PageRank algorithm for stock and later sold it for a total of $336 million in the mid 00's. Check out this for info[1]

[1]https://matr.net/news/why-stanford-is-celebrating-the-google...

[michaelt]

> If the patents were so valuable why wouldn't the universities be starting unicorns left and right

There's a vast gulf between the Fraunhofer MP3 patent and the commercial success of the iPod, Spotify and suchlike.

[reissbaker]

"But that type of communication threatens patents..."

Patents, for all their downsides, are designed to get scientists to share results. Without patents you have enormous disincentive to sharing repeatable results: you can't charge money for it if anyone can go and copy you. With patents, you can freely share results and still charge money.

Should patents last as long as they do? Should there be a cap on how much companies can charge for patented medicine, since it's effectively a temporary government-granted monopoly on curing disease? All reasonable questions, but I don't think abolishing (non-software) patents would improve communication between scientists.