I suspect there are many where the person that had the idea and did the research is completely anonymous because the person that managed and/or funded the lab made sure they were the ones with the name on the patent and marketing material.
Alternatively, could this name be a pseudonym for the research group writ large? It assigns the patent to the whole group to avoid giving any particular team member the credit, and it also avoids identifying any individual who may be regularly dealing with classified information.
I’ve no idea if this is actually possible within the rules of the patent system, though.
On one hand I absolutely believe this does routinely happen. On the other every researcher/inventor out there with a project that went nowhere claims that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough and only silenced because of the government/corporations/illuminati. I'd wager the vast majority are in the second category.
Good point about that! Obviously there are alot of big players like that. However I heard this was a small lab, so I guess we don't know yet what their patenting power is.
I'd love to hear more about this academic dishonesty. I've been disconnected from academia for a long time.
For me, I specifically make a lot of my work public to avoid someone else claiming sole invention rights--as I have reasonable public proof of prior art. Though to this day this has never happened, and people have always given my projects more than appropriate credit without even having to ask.
But the opposite happens because the same scientists own IP and run the study to determine its worth. So we know less and waste more than having done nothing.
They also spend a lot of time looking for University researchers that have found something they like, then buy esclusive rights to the compound
This recently happened to a prof in my department. He's an organic chemist, d evisde a way to prevent plaque buildup, and had the rights to the compound contracted out by an unknown pharmaceutical company
My boss also had a meeting with Pfizer about a thing
In this case the research would have been publicly funded and been obtained by a private company who bypassed the need to spend money on development
That's a shady technique, IMHO, because it's our tax money directly enriching a corporation
What about a distinction between people who license a patent to only one company (e.g., a university researcher creates a fast-and-accurate HIV test, the university licenses it to a company to produce & market it) versus companies who hold a patent and try to collect licensing fees from every company under the sun, most of whom have no connection to another?
Yes, it's very different for two reasons: 1) many ideas in science are highly non trivial compared to all sorts of crap that gets patented and 2) as scientists all we usually care about is getting some credit for our ideas. We want them to be known and used by everyone though.
Quite a huge contrast to companies that want their ideas for their own so only they can profit from them.
I know a few academics, and they are rightly careful about sharing their ideas before they get far enough with the implementation (lab work, publications) to ensure that they will be credited.
Perhaps it is just different fields, but most academics I know (I know math from my own graduate studies and history indirectly through my wife) will talk your ear off about their current work if you express a willingness to listen much less an interest. Most of the ones I know (again math and history) aren't worried about idea stealing because they have more ideas than they have time to work on and they know that all but the most trivial ideas will take substantial work to go forward with, its the research that counts not the idea for research.
IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent.
IANAL, but this definitely fits with my limited understanding of patent law. But that does not mean ideas per se have value outside the law. This is more an indication that patent law needs to be reformed than that ideas have intrinsic value.
(Incidentally, Richard Feynman has an interesting story about how his name wound up on the patent for nuclear submarines in his book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?)
At least if they'd kept their findings secret, researchers could independently be researching the same thing.
Now independent researchers won't want to touch lugdunin because they'll need to license the patent, however they won't know whether licensing the patent is worthwhile until they do their research. This will prevent further research, not encourage it.
The problem is private companies generally being for-profit enterprises they tend to fund only those research projects that they believe will have a positive return for them. They also have a strong incentive to keep the products of their research secret and only divulge them when they discover a concrete application that is suitable to be patented. This is all very well, but it's not a socially optimal way to conduct research.
Sometimes you can exit with much more than that. A family member who spent decades in research was able to get the IP rights to some of their work and is running a stealth mode startup to develop it further.
How often are private companies paying at least in part for this research... also, since academia is abusing the patent system as much as everyone else, it's kind of expected.
Unpublished science for practical applications of course exists but that is called R&D and is not generally made public cause it’s corporate IP. If that’s what you mean.
And in many cases the universities own the IP associated with the research that goes on in their departments so they keep the source and treat it like a company would treat a trade secret. It's likely Washington will patent this and try to license the patents.
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