
NASA puts nanotechnology swarm patents up for auction - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/nasa-puts-nanotechnology-swarm-patents-up-for-auction.ars
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showerst
Honest question, not trying to start a political argument - Isn't the research
that leads to these patents fully funded by the US government? If so,
shouldn't they really be freely licensed to anyone who wants to use them?

I know this is how it works with copyrights on US govt work, but I know
nothing of US gov't patent policy.

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ajratner
The patents are assigned to NASA (see for example:
[http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&pat=75...](http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&pat=7543274)).
If NASA had been funding an outside contractor they would have had a non-
exclusive non-transferable 'walk-in' license to the patents; however they must
have invented them in-house and so they own them.

One could argue that even though NASA = the gov't funded the R&D that resulted
in these patents, they don't need the monopoly rights of patents because if
others then take their ideas, no loss!- it could just be considered stimulus
spending, which is arguably part of the government's mandate anyway and thus
not just a net loss of money on the budget balance sheet...

However, and in my opinion far more importantly, there is a nice incentive
structure at work here to the general benefit, which is that by allowing NASA
to own and sell intellectual property- but only via the public patent system-
you give them a monetary incentive to disclose their patents and put the
technology behind them into the public domain. If they had no rights to own
the technology, then they would have no clear incentive to ever release it
(which is what government agencies do anyway with many top secret
technologies- these it does not own exclusivity to, which might be what you
were thinking of). However this way, there was an incentive for NASA to file a
patent, it did, and people could have been doing incremental/additive R&D
based on the publicly disclosed invention spec for the past three years. "On
the shoulders of giants" is still a decent credo generally, even (or
especially, depending on your perspective) if you have to pay said giant a
small licensing fee sometimes...

(Of course there are other huge problems with the patent system but in my
opinion this fundamental tenet of creating an incentive structure which
encourages (a) invention and (b) disclosure is still- theoretically at least-
a vastly good thing for us)

