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Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains
(news.ucr.edu)
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Naturally, you'll want to patent it so you can profit off it instead of just releasing it to benefit all of humanity. Fucking greedy ass people sometimes...
I do t know UC Riverside’s history for how they manage their patents, but I’m on the side of giving them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. It’s okay to have a patent. It’s ok to profit off an invention you spent a lot of money producing. But what’s not ok would be upping the price so high that people have to choose dying over getting the product because they simply can’t afford it. Let’s hope UC does the former and not the latter.
Let's be more clear: IF THEY DONT PATENT IT SOMEONE ELSE WILL.
UCR is fairly innocuous compared to some alternatives.
That's in fact why some universities patent their research stuff in the first place, to ensure nobody else can. They'll then make it a policy to take 0€ in licensing fees, but this precludes anybody else from starting to lock the tech behind money.
Source: My uni back in the days had a few dozen patents for exactly this reason, too.
IANAL but patents rely on originality, meaning a preprint of the original paper is basically enough to make the technology impossible to patent. Well probably more than just the paper I guess.
Not anymore. The US switched from a "first-to-invent" system to a "first-to-file." Prior art doesn't matter for shit.
I learned it too that it has to be "new". Most likely it is a hell of a lot easier to directly patent it and have a strong legal foundation than just wait around and scramble for proof if it needs to be. Probably also helps being picked up by the industry.
Yep. At max a university will take back its investment amount so that they can operationalize this sort of activity.
Generally these "patented" products from universities are funded via tax payer money. I am not cool with them profiting off something that is intended to save lives and was also funded by the very people who's lives will be affected.
Putting things behind a patent wall only hinders progress.
A patent also ensures no one else can patent it. If they make it affordable and available they are protected from someone else patenting it and then “profitmaxxing” because they have legal recourse to prevent that.
Of course now it is up to them to do that…
Public universities receive funding from a multitude of sources. Research is typically funded by grants, which may come from state or federal sources, but they can also come from alumni, fundraising, or charitable trusts.
Regardless, patents are a necessary part of invention. As others have pointed out, without a patent, what’s to stop some other entity from coming along and (for example) using your hard work to make themselves rich? I’d wager if it were your invention/discovery, you’d want protections too.
There are some entities out there that would easily abuse patents. But I find it hard to believe a public university would be one of them.
Just because it’s patented doesn’t mean it can’t still be released for the benefit of humanity. It does mean it will be harder for some for-profit entity to claim the process for themselves. This may be naive, but I feel like a public (state-owned) nonprofit research university will be a better steward for the patent than a private entity that’s seeking to maximize shareholder value. I would expect that they would either license the patent freely for humanitarian benefit or at a reasonable cost to support the university’s ongoing research efforts.
That's not how patents work. They have to guard it or else someone else will. You don't know the university's goals yet, but you would know the goal of a for profit pharma company.
It’s a fucking nonprofit. Without the royalty stream, shit like this can only be discovered, developed, and brought to market by big pharma. Then what happens?
You expect too much. They couldn’t see anything beyond their outrage.
It’s a public institution. They aren’t making a profit on this. They do have a right to control their intellectual property, however.