Reply To: March 5-9 2007: 7th Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion Research in DC

[Brian H]

Tulse wrote:

I’ve experienced the opposite: extreme paranoia and protectiveness within academics, because there are limited research dollars to go around.

But for pure academics (i.e., those without commercial ties), publication is the coin of the realm — it’s what gets you tenure, it’s what gets you promoted, it’s what builds your reputation. Such researchers may not share unpublished work, but that’s because they are eager to scoop others in official published articles. In other words, the motivation in academics is to “share” via publication. There is no such motivation for commercial research.
Once again, I insist that you misunderstand the purpose of patents. They require full disclosure, with protection against commercial exploitation by others for a period of time. Whether that period of time is appropriate to each class or type of invention or application is a separate question. In a sense, the race to be “first to publish” is similar in academia: secrecy up until disclosure.

Once a patent is in place, the information in it often/usually stimulates others to research variations or modifications or upgrades sufficiently different to warrant their own patents.

In a way, both environments attempt to channel and ration resources to the most productive and successful. Both environments have plenty of people whose expertise consists mainly of gaming the system, or abusing it (e.g., patenting overarching concepts, or naturally occurring genes and DNA, etc.) Wishing for a system or environment with unlimited co-operativeness and resources to solve that problem is just silly, IMO.