alt Hacker News> In terms of why the public funds research, your statement might be true
Yes this is what I meant. We fund research because we think pure research is valuable. It needs to be done without requiring a financial return. Products sometimes come out of it and that's also a public benefit, but direct results of the research are not a "product" they are the starting point to a possible product. There is still a lot of development that has to occur to get to the product stage.
That’s all true and I agree with all of that. But again, that doesn’t address why publicly funded research ought to be locked away for private gain. This is not to look a gift-horse in the mouth; open access publication has really taken off in the last 5 years, but for a long time until recently, the research itself was only available for relatively hefty fees from private, for-profit publishers. And nothing’s changed about the patent and university venture system; publicly funded research isn’t up for grabs by the public, and when successful, the profits don’t go to the public. The patent system as incentive to invest in research makes sense when protecting private companies that take risks with private money, but why should the public only get the indirect trickle-down benefits of research, when they pay for it directly?