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Cost of knowledge production exorbitant, says Cusat VC

KOCHI: Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) Vice-Chancellor Gangan Prathap has said that it will take at least five years for the university to develop an industrial patent in view of the huge cost required for the process.

In his keynote address at a session on ‘free software in higher education’ at the second national free software meet held at CUSAT on Sunday, Dr. Prathap said that the university’s research and development (R and D) budget was small. This would affect the creation of industrial patents. The cost of producing knowledge was really huge today, he said.

Stating that the United States generates nearly 1,60,000 high-quality research papers every year, the Vice-Chancellor said that the U. S. government allocates around 35 billion dollars for supporting this research. For an industrial patent, the U.S. spends around an average Rs. 55 crore, he said.

C. N. Krishnan, Programme Director of AU-KBC Research Centre at the Madras Institute of Technology on Anna University campus, who spoke on ‘protecting traditional and indigenous knowledge in digital age’ said that the patenting of traditional knowledge would only help in commercialising the values of knowledge. He said that traditional knowledge would become a commodity in the market through patenting.

Dr. Krishnan said that free software would be able to check the privatisation of knowledge to a certain extent.

Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat called for a concerted fight against the move to patent software. He said that the patenting of software would only help those trying to gain monopoly over knowledge.

The two-day national meet, where several sessions related to free software were held, concluded on Sunday evening.

An exhibition of free software held as part of the meet attracted a large number of students.

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