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Hey, Didn't Taxpayers Pay For Those Patents NASA Is Auctioning Off?
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| ReallyEvilCanine writes in to let us know that Ocean Tomo, the patent
| auctioning company has worked out an agreement to auction off a package of 25
| NASA patents covering things like signal processing, GPS for spacecraft and
| sensor technologies.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080915/1859022278.shtml
Taxpayer Patent Extortion
,----[ Quote ]
| Wow. Mike Masnick writes about NASA’s plan to auction off some of its patent
| portfolio to the private sector. When I read this I had to do a double-take:
| NASA has a patent portfolio?
|
| This is absurd. The purpose of patent law is to promote the progress of the
| useful arts by giving inventors an incentive to invent. NASA engineers
| already have an incentive to invent: they’re being paid taxpayer dollars to
| do so. Accordingly granting patents to NASA is a pure dead-weight loss to the
| economy. It restricts the free flow of ideas with no offsetting benefit from
| improved incentives. Indeed, this is precisely why the copyrights on
| government-created works are immediately placed in the public domain.
`----
http://techliberation.com/2008/09/17/taxpayer-patent-extortion/
They shouldn't be "placed in the public domain". They should not be filed for
in the first place. It's a total waste of time and labour.
Recent:
Open source patents: Four companies offer green tech to public domain
,----[ Quote ]
| So it turns out that the Eco-Patent Commons, which I wrote about back in
| January, isn’t just another empty-handed cooperative industry effort.
|
| Three new companies, Bosch, DuPont and Xerox, have joined the effort and
| another, Sony, has contributed an additional patent to the community.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/green/?p=1341
Intellectual Property Regime Stifles Science and Innovation, Nobel Laureates
Say
,----[ Quote ]
| Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede
| the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent
| thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued
| for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure
| to encourage innovation, he said.
|
| Another problem is that the social returns from innovation do not accord with
| the private returns associated with the patent system, Stiglitz said. The
| marginal benefit from innovation is that an idea may become available sooner
| than it might have. But the person who secures the patent on it wins a
| long-term monopoly, creating a gap between private and social returns.
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http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1129
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