Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Software patents in academia

Author:Duncan Smeed
Posted:8/6/2000; 4:04:35 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/6/2000
Msg #:19501 (In response to 19498)
Prev/Next:19500 / 19502

I'm not sure if I have anything really insightful to say other than that as an academic I am opposed to software patents as a matter of principle. Unfortunately from my pov my University seems keen on using such patents to establish/explot IPR and actively encourages faculty to pursue patent protection. IMHO, this is screwing up academic research - especially for PhD students that really need to get their ideas promulgated as extensively as possible in order that rigorous academic peer review can be undertaken. I've not really been looking but I haven't seen much discussion about this. AFAIK, very few, if any, of the Univeristy software spin-outs have been mega-successful in exploiting their patent portfolios. It seems to me that they would have been much better to have released their algorithms under some form of open-source licensing to get as wide and as rapid exposure as possible. But, hey, what do I really know about their funding/licensing deals.

A case in point is a spin off the Compression Research group in the Department of Computer Science at Strathclyde University - Essential Viewing Systems whose first paragraph on their home page pronounces:

Our patent-protected video compression is poised to become the video compression market leader.  It can be used for low-bandwidth services (e.g. Internet Video Phone, Web video) all the way up to high-bandwidth services (e.g. Video-on-Demand), consistently beating the other leading compression systems.  Decompression is so low complexity that we have even implemented a Java™ version of decoder which allows us to decode video on Web Pages.

I can't help wondering what their market penetration would have been if the researchers had open-sourced their algorithms/code in 1995 when they were (presumably) well ahead of the competition.



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