Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

It's actually quite interesting. I had beers with a development officer for a major research university a few months ago. To me, this was a fascinating opportunity to "learn about how the world really works" so I had all sorts of silly questions like "how much do people pay to buy their child an undeserved spot in an incoming class" and whatever. That replies were silly, but not particularly interesting.

What was interesting...

Apparently there's recently been a new stream of potential donors of a certain type, specifically they are very interested in donating towards specific types of research (there's nothing new here, giving to XXX institution to support cancer research has been happening forever). What is different, is that in exchange, THEY WANT THE IP AT THE END so that they may commercialize it.

Of course this is silly, the PI owns their IP and when it's transferred out it usually goes to the PI's company with some cut on future revenues going to the university...

I just thought it was amusing that there's people out there hangin' around universities, hoping to buy IP under the auspices of calling it charitable giving.

There's a lot of that, actually. It was trendy for a while for unis to try to monetize their research, and a lot of people became unhappy in various ways - researchers pissed off about the giveaways and being told whom they could talk to, donors who got patent rights for things that were really only useful for trolling, and university admins who were dreaming of riches and didn't get much aside from various people yelling at them.

I dunno if just cracks me up as it's so brazen- it's like they want to try and hire professors to do their R&D for them and assume that said professors will just hand it all over if anything valuable comes from their life's work.

Professors do this all the time. The pressure to keep the lights on and your grad students funded is not to be underestimated.

As an industry employee the IP of your work belongs to your employer, I don't think it's a given that it should necessarily be different in research/academia. It is, obviously, and I think overall that's good, but we shouldn't take it for granted. There's nothing wrong with questioning the status quo.

As you note, there have been different norms in different institutions, and if you're a used to working for for-profit entities, I'm sure the norms you're used to seem, well, normal.

But sure, there's no harm in thought experiments. And we have a lot of different behaviors over time to look at from a range of institutions. You might start asking what changes when incentives are restructured to encourage short-term profit over discovery, and how that might change teaching and research universities.

For starters, an easy one: if revenue production becomes the primary measure of the value of a field, how does historical research pay its way while avoiding capture by particular interests?

Also, if you want to _really_ be daring, ask questions about what might happen if employees weren't forced by default into work-for-hire arrangements. What if corps were a bit more like academia?

Employer-employee relationships are very different from PI-institution relationships. PIs operate like little businesses within an institution. They write their own grants for their own funding. Sometimes the institution coughs up some corn, but usually it goes the other way. The institution extracts overheads from grant funds to pay for infrastructure.

When it comes to matters of research, it's rare in the American system that PIs take orders from the institution.

At the university where I did my MS, the university owned the IP.

Patents were a standard affair: the university owned and paid for the patent, the researcher(s) (including the PI and grad students) got inventorship. In the eventuality of a licensing deal, university would get a 50% cut, the inventors would get the remaining 50%.

It was a significant revenue stream for the university.

When I was a course grader at my university years back, I had to sign a form saying any IP I invented during that time was owned by the university. Yes for grading homework, I have to assign all IP right to them.

Yes, there are lots of famous examples. E.g. John Chowning invented FM synthesis for musical applications but had to assign the patent to Stanford where he worked as a researcher: "The FM patent produced about $22.9 million in royalties for Stanford University (largely via the sale of FM chips for soundcards)." With a patent date of 1975 and a duration of 20 years, they must have received royalties until 1995 off every OPL family chip (used in Ad Lib, Sound Blaster, etc) and all the Yamaha instruments based on FM synthesis (I believe Yamaha had an exclusive license in that market). That's just one particular example I happened to remember, but every tech-focused university probably has a large portfolio of these sorts of patents.

Stanford also owns the original PageRank patent, and licensed it to Google for 1.8 million shares. Apparently they sold those in 2005, earning $336 million.

There's lots of IP shenanigans, and it's not axiomatically true that the PI owns their IP. My university, which is a pretty middle of the road state school, has several people who work on this full time, and they're genuinely busy.

The tricky part here is that if you call it a "gift" you don't get charged overhead, whereas you do if you call it contract research, which is what it actually is.

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