Nasa Releases Dozens of Patents into the Public Domain | Hacker News Reader

Nasa Releases Dozens of Patents into the Public Domain

technology.nasa.gov

127 pointsdenzil_correa38 comments

Some confusion here about government research and patents. As a government researcher with patents, I will weigh in with an approximation of our patent criteria:

1. Increases the potential for commercialization of the technology. If you have an invention which will take effort to commercialize, companies are less likely to spend that effort without any patent protection. Offering an exclusive license on the patent can increase the chance of anyone doing anything with it.

2. Fulfill the goals of a collaborative research agreement between the government and a private company.

3. Further US manufacturing. The taxpayers pay us to do research to fuel industry in the USA, not Germany or China.

4. May lead to commercialization license. This is way down on the list, and total patent royalties amount to <0.1% of our budget.

I would guess that the NASA patent set represents cases where the patent did not end up fulfilling one of those goals, and they are releasing it into the wild to see if it does better on its own.

> 1. increases the potential for commercialization

I don't get this. If an idea is good, monopoly is icing, but not required for its adoption. If say NREL comes up with a something that increases efficiency of something by 2%, I'd want all of America and potentially the world to use it. If NIST finds a cheap way to make welds more robust and void free, I'd want every bridge, building and car to use these new techniques, not trapped in a patent monopoly.

> 3. Further US manufacturing

Do US Gov patents require that manufacturing be in the US? Is government sponsored research an R&D arm of industry or is it to undertake projects that _don't_ have a direct economic payback or are too large or too risky?

What you say might be the "correct answer" but it isn't one I find palatable. The majority of government sponsored research should be open to all. In some circumstances I can see limiting it to people in the US and under even narrower circumstances, limiting it via a patent.

If an idea is good

What if an idea is merely a small incremental improvement with a clear but somewhat expensive path to market?

Then is it good?

Patent the innovations in bringing it to market, or keep them as a trade secret. Other players shouldn't be punished because someone is both inefficient and has the money to spend on acquiring a patent. Government patents look like an excellent way to transfer publicly developed technology to the corporations with the access and cash to purchase them (GE, Boeing, etc).

I guess I didn't explain my scenario well enough.

NASA has some idea. People that work in the market see the idea and think "Oh, gee, that would make our products better, but it would take $10 million to figure it out". With no patent they then think "too bad it isn't worth developing".

Maybe that's an overly constructed scenario, but tech transfer isn't just about getting people to use great ideas (a better welding technique is an example of a great idea), it's also about commercializing ideas that would not necessarily get commercialized in the absence of the patent.

If the new welding method is developed enough to patent, but possibly not enough to mass produce new welding equipment, then it will require an investment from someone to get it into use outside the laboratory. Being able to license them a patent provides a greater incentive to make that investment. It's possible for an idea to be simultaneously an improvement, cheap in the long run, and also require an up-front investment that might never be made back without a guarantee of monopoly.

I can't judge how frequently this occurs, but it seems reasonable.

Being able to license them a patent provides a greater incentive to make that investment.

In theory. But that's not the only way things can play out. It's just as likely that if such an innovation is offered freely to everyone, that everyone will feel compelled to adopt it, exactly because of the fear that their competitors will. And nobody wants to get left behind.

Given that it's basically impossible to know how a given scenario will play out ahead of time, I don't buy this whole "grant patents on government sponsored developments and then sell them" based on some hypothetical scenario that lacks any real justification.

In engineering, there is a phrase "the last 10% is 90% of the work." Much government R&D (which is more "R" than "D") falls into that category. In order to commercialize it, someone has to come along and do that remaining 90%. The patents create an incentive for someone to do that.

>If an idea is good, monopoly is icing, but not required for its adoption.

I would amend this to say that if an idea is obviously very good, and has an obviously large market, then monopoly is icing. The inventions that you described fit this description, but 99% of inventions do not. It's more likely that your invention is either a small part that might contribute to a big improvement in a major industry, or a complete invention that could make a big difference in a market that doesn't exist yet. In either case, a company might not want to invest the resources to find out if your invention is useful just to have their competitors copy them once the proof-of-concept is available.

>Do US Gov patents require that manufacturing be in the US?

Not by statute that I'm aware of. But again, if you've invented some esoteric device that might have a $50M market one day, nothing makes government patent review boards happier than licensing that to a small business in Minneapolis who will hire a few dozen engineers and maybe even get the thing built in the US.

Also a non-monetary incentive for scientist types. It shows your peers you have accomplished something and could be useful for future employment. Not everyone is motivated to start a business. When I was in private industry I was someimes allowed to patent something before publishing it.

To those asking the question "why aren't patents automatically in the public domain?", the question received a decent answer on Stack Exchange two years ago:

http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/are-patents-...

"No, they are owned by the U.S. and controlled by the specific agency where the inventing happened. However, there is a policy of licensing. It is covered in 35 USC 209. The logic behind this is that the U.S. would like the public to benefit from the invention and if anybody can do it, it may very well be that no one actually does it. Without some exclusivity it may be that no one will be able to justify the investment to enter the market." -George White

One of the comments to that answer also suggests inventors of government patents also get a fixed percentage of revenue, which wouldn't surprise me as an incentive to drive government employees to come up with novel inventions on the clock.

A similar argument could be made for copyrighting government works: maybe no one would publish them if not granted a monopoly, and maybe getting a kickback would incentivize government employees to create copyrightable works.

... I'm glad it isn't, and am inclined to view government patents in the same way most of us view crown copyright.

The cases are pretty different. The government isn't generally creating copyrightable works with the hope of turning a profit on them. They're creating them, e.g. as part of the mission of an agency. Think NASA photographs for example.

To be copyrightable, the work needs to exist in more or less final form. That's what is copyrighted.

By contrast, while what's patented goes beyond an idea, it may not be usable for anything until someone has spent significant money to commercialize it--and maybe not even then.

It's an informative answer in terms of what current policy is, but "it may be" is not a good justification for legal restriction on what people can do with government inventions.

Finally! I can build coils for my plasmoid thrusters[1] and not worry about NASA coming after me. :-)

More seriously, this is something I really like about NASA and their mission, they are excellent at technology transfer. They did a lot of work on Lithium batteries that got widely licensed for little to no money and that has made for an explosion of battery applications (no pun intended)

[1] http://technology.nasa.gov/public_domain/MFS-32364-1

Here's a better view of the same thing: https://www.google.com/patents/US7808353

Note that this coil essentially is the thruster. You put gas (from a compressed tank) in one end and it fires out the back, creating thrust from electricity + the gas. It's not quite a massless thruster, but very close!

This represents a major improvement over the ion propulsion on Deep Space 1.

In my case I've modified it to be an Plasmoid overthruster. :-)

The government using tax money to develop things, patent them, then charge license fees for them seems quite at odds with the Constitutional purpose of patents:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

I'm not sure I understand your complaint. They only hold onto the patents for a short time before they become available to the public. It's not like they're holding them for 20+ years. I clicked on 5 random links from the new patent list and they were all less than 10 years old.

Why do they need to hold onto them at all? They were paid for by the public, so why are they kept from the public at all?

Analogously, the FCC auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder instead of leasing it to the provider who will provide the best or cheapest service using that spectrum. Seems like an effort to ensure that the citizens get gouged.

There is a deep body of economic theory that argues that it's much more efficient to simply auction off spectrum than to have a government agency make decisions about "who will provide the best or cheapest service" using that spectrum. Indeed, the old model of licensing spectrum to who the FCC thought of as the best users resulted in the current problem of prime spectrum being allocated to low-value uses like broadcast television.

Tom Hazlett's papers are a good introduction into the orthodox view of spectrum economics: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1583098.

You have got to be kidding me, is this writing typical of economic publishing? This is a circle jerk echo chamber of cliche and truism.

Low-value broadcast television is a by product of auctioning spectrum and maximizing profit. If something is a public good, it isn't in the publics good to maximize the profit. The fitness function of the whole thing is flawed. In what measure of efficiency does the duplication of poor cellular service and capability rank? How far into the future will such byzantine structures exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase

> Low-value broadcast television is a by product of auctioning spectrum and maximizing profit.

Broadcast television spectrum wasn't allocated by auction. It was allocated by government bureaucrats deciding what was most important.

> If something is a public good, it isn't in the public's good to maximize the profit.

It's in the public's interest to maximize the economic revenues generated from the resource.

Did you link to Coase because he's a "circle jerk echo chamber of cliche", or for some other reason? Coase is obviously famous for advocating specifically the auction of the wireless spectrum.

You're missing a step.

In order for a bidder to offer the highest bid, they have to be providing the cheapest or best service, otherwise they can't afford the bid.

I could see if the FCC were auctioning off the entire spectrum you could get into trouble, but if they are auctioning off parts, then there is competition and those offering the highest value to customers can afford to pay the most.

Can anyone explain: why are government works automatically public domain (not copyrighted) but government inventions are not unless explicitly stated?

Probably because copyright is automatic and patents aren't. You have to actively patent an invention to make sure nobody else patents it, but the same risk (someone else copyrighting the government's work) isn't really applicable on the other side.

I don't think that's the case: an unpatented invention (that is disclosed) becomes prior art, which protects the invention from being patented by someone else.

Theoretically. The US patent system is a mess, from the rubber-stamp examiners in DC to the ridiculous judges in East Texas.

I don't think that's the case: an unpatented invention (that is disclosed) becomes prior art, which protects the invention from being patented by someone else.

If an unpatented invention is disclosed publically (not through a patent application), then it becomes public domain and nobody can patent it.

Also, the US is no longer "first to invent", but rather "first to file". You could have a claim that you invented it first, but if someone files before you, you are SOL.

Copyright is automatic in principle, but not in practice. You have to pay lawyers a shitload of money in order to enforce either. The same risk, of having to pay lawyers a shitload of money, stands in both cases.

The government has one hundred and one ways to get around that "restriction".

Primarily employees and contractors can automatically assign works to the government whether it is copyrighted or patented. Then the government maintains the transferred rights, instead of having to deal with the pesky public domain thing.

Are these parents as useful as all other patents, where you require a lawyer to English translator to get a gist, and almost reinvention to get it to actually work from the description?

Someone let Walt Kerman run with his strategy again. :)

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Strategies#Open-Sour...

Misread as Dozens of Planets.

I was confused.

At risk of a downvote, I have to ask: am I the only one who read the headline thusly,

"NASA Releases Dozens of Planets into the Public Domain"

"Wow," I'm thinking, "that's way cool of them..."

Whereas the _correct_ title is probably just as cool, if not cooler.

> Nasa

NASA is an acronym and not a word

Some style guides recommend that word-like acronyms (i.e., pronounced as a word, rather than its individual letters) be capitalised as though they were normal words (cf. BBC vs. laser).

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