And a pet peeve of mine (not necessarily related to the subject):

Take a university, that gets substantial state funding. Take a professor and a
(graduate) student(s). Take a couple of thousand lab hours and research using
the excellent facilities provided and the good name of the university (built on
what ? - see below) and you have a new valuable, proven idea. Then, these nice
people go to a patent office (perhaps the university's) and patent it, and then
they get support to create a company that markets the idea (again with some
starting funding from the university and/or venture capital arranged through
it). I beg your pardon ?! Funding for the research will have been at least 40%
state contributions towards education, not subsidizing a firm (which is illegal
in many countries, f.ex. in the EC, under most circumstances). How come this is
possible ? How come tax money can be used to create 'wealth' sold back to
taxpayers, with income tax and VAT tagged on ? Isn't this double taxation ?

The US once upon a time had a law where any research that was done while being
sponsored by tax money had to be released under an open copyright or to the
public domain. They reversed that sometime in the 1970s. One of the results was
the closing of access of universities to Unix source code, which led to the
development (explosion?) of free open source software 10 years later, in the
1990s. This is probably one of the very few examples where such a positive
outcome was possible. What about the rest ? 

What do people think when they take up mortgages to put their kids through
university and then read in the newspaper what dandy high-tech firms the
university spawned by blowing some of the tuition fees and state aids on
research that becomes privately held intellectual property, out of reach
essentially forever to those who paid up ? And meanwhile, the same university
would enjoy serious tax privileges and status nobody else can dream of. Huh ?!

Now with the new energy crisis and other problems (like hurricanes etc), a lot
of university-generated information is used to find solutions to serious
problems. Most of that information predates the 'turnabout' that made it
possible for universities to sell their tax funded research. Papers used to
design wind turbines and solar collectors almost invariably bear 1960s and 
1970s dates. Coincidence ? Is it a coincidence that a web search for more 
recent serious studies in the domain (and often in any domain) often lands web
hits with the now well-known Google 'un-sponsored' links that allow no access 
to information without paying ?

Peter P.


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