Comment Re:CMU is clearly a patent troll (Score 2) 167
But you can also decide to forego this return on investment for the good of mankind. Which, arguably, is what universities should be pursuing in the first place, not trying to maximize their ROI, as private companies do very well.
Profits are very useful because you get valuable information about what you're doing and it allows resources to be put to the most valuable use. But it doesn't really apply to basic research. That kind of research is not meant to create products that can be sold for a profit, but to increase our collective knowledge. This may or may not give rise to new applications, technologies, and products, but that's not main point. And if something does prove valuable, wouldn't it be better if it were freely licensed to all interested parties to allow for cheap production, for other people to freely improve upon it, etc.?
That's the whole point behind endowments. Give universities so much money that their survival doesn't depend on their monetizing their discoveries. CMU has a $1 billion endowment that makes it very unlikely that it'll have to stop innovating because they failed to secure a patent on everything they discover. Especially since much of the research conducted in universities is actually funded by the government, as a public good.