[Buttons840]

Do companies want to profit from this computer science research being done under a NDA? Don't they have to release these advances in the form of a product to earn a profit?

Then show me some products which demonstrate this "cutting-edge" computer science research.

[wcarss]

They don't necessarily have to, and even if they did, it may not be obvious.

Consider a financial company working to improve prediction algorithms for their in-house use, hiring smartypants PhDs and giving them free reign and great pay. The result after ten years could be way ahead (or even just a little ahead) of the academic world's work and never release a product with a sticker for a big shiny new algorithm.

The firm wouldn't even have to stand out in its success; it could do reasonably well compared to others, and just attribute a lot of its modest success to its algorithmic insights.

Even in externally released products, really clever ways to get around things aren't necessarily visible. Just today I was reading about Jonathan Blow's work [1] on localised kriging [2] for his upcoming game The Witness. He's pulling from advanced geostatics academia for a little feature he wanted in a game, and if he didn't blog about it (and then discuss enhancements in the comments) no one would know it existed - even once the game is released. A small example to be sure, but I think it exemplifies the point.

[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/kriging-is-cool/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging

[raquo]

I don't see how this situation is an issue of patents, really. A company that is decidedly keeping its prediction technology secret to gain an edge in a market which is entirely about being better at prediction than the other guys is not going to patent and therefore open source their technology no matter what happens to the patent system.

[geofft]

Patents exist to encourage inventions to be published, in exchange for exclusive licensing rights of the invention. Their entire purpose is to be an alternative to trade secrets. So it is fair to say that effective patents are those that are best at convincing people that they should publish their work instead of keeping it secret, and that there will be no financial impact to them doing so.

[michaelt]

Patents only offer you protection against detectable infringement. If it's possible for company A to keep their algorithm secret, it's possible for company B to keep their infringement secret.

[raquo]

I understand that, but in the examples given in this thread of CS areas that are lacking published research, it is pretty clear that companies develop technologies in secret because secrecy provides them with more value and serves as a better protection against competitors than patents would. You just can't make a financial firm share their trading recipes that have any sort of value. We're lucky they don't patent trading/financial versions of 1-click-to-buy.

[anonymoushn]

A company could instead profit by trading using their results, and some results could belong to governments.

I'm reminded that my graph theory professor said that he could factor polynomials over finite fields in polynomial time, but that he could not tell me how to do it.