Dark Intellectual Property. Why We Need a Kickstarter for Patents - 0 views
www.wired.com/...need-a-kickstarter-for-patents
ip academia paper argument Tibi Greg university dark IP
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Aug 13
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“dark IP,” the intellectual property (IP) that remains on the shelf: undiscovered, unexplored, untapped
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our ability to catch so much in the net by dragging the surface (to use Mike Bergman’s analogy) actually still misses the invisible wealth of what lies beneath.
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But dark IP is different than the other hidden-depths knowledge since it’s also unfair. Because taxpayers paid for much of the research — whether basic understanding with long-term benefits or more applied research with shorter-term benefits — that now lies collecting dust on university shelves.
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the people of the United States spent an average of nearly $40 billion every year supporting institutional research
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most of the IP (much of which we paid for) isn’t actually on the street, where entrepreneurial folks can do something with it.
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very few people are aware of — let alone able to access — an invention outside the social circle of its inventors, the scientific community involved, or even the “crowd” that’s sometimes harnessed in open innovation
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Not democratizing the IP itself — institutions should still own and generate profits from the intellectual property they’ve created — but democratizing the ways in which we allow this IP to be discovered and licensed.
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This turns off the average entrepreneur, who doesn’t have the patience and bandwidth to engage in all the unnecessary overhead of searching, browsing, and licensing IP.
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Another missing piece is ways of allowing the crowd to interact with each other and decide which technologies should be licensed
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Most of the examples I listed above haven’t changed much over the past decade or broken into the mainstream.
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Such a website would bring together not just funds and transactions, but communities — with their attendant feedback mechanisms — that are interested in creating something novel around unused patents.