

Ask HN: The Ethics of Working with Someone Else's research - kshatrea

I live and work in India. I have some experience of research and development in a certain field. Recently I decided to start up on my own and developed certain algorithms based on available research, which do borrow somewhat from current algorithms.
I have an ethics question: I am not American. Most of this current public research is paid for by the US taxpayer (although I did pay a minuscule amount of US tax since I lived there for 2 years). The university that did the research behind the algorithms that I have partaken of (remember I did the coding myself, only looked at papers publicly available; I can't stress this enough) has never responded to my requests for licensing parts of their algorithm (the reason why I try to license is that they have applied for a US patent). They haven't come into the Indian market and I don't have any plans of trying to go outside India (and besides, who's to know if I'll succeed or not at this point). 
All these preliminaries lead to the question: Do I use the papers in the public domain together with my modifications for a commercial enterprise? Or do I drop it?
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mattsfrey
From an ethical standpoint I don't believe for the most part in software
patents period, let alone patenting something of a much purer form like a
mathematical formula or an algorithm. Many will disagree but in general free
information is a classical tenant of hackers. If you've looked into the legal
circumstances and it seems OK, I say make hay while the sun shines.

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kshatrea
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it.

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ankitml
I cant say about the legal issues, but on ethics front this is ok. The purpose
of research is not to remain in libraries and papers. The purpose is to
benefit the humanity. Make everyone better of. You have played your part in
conveying the researchers your intentions.

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10dpd
If the algorithms have been published in a peer-review paper, you are free to
implement and improve on them.

Ethically, if you make improvements it would be proper to publish your updated
algorithm.

