Georgia Tech Fights Prof, Others Over Chip Startups | Prof in Jail

From the darker side of entrepreneurship on campus. Technology transfer gone wrong at Georgia Tech. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s George Mathis:

The university claims the group is responsible for funneling about $2 million in school funds to a company owned by microchip professor Joy Laskar, 47, and research engineer Stephane Pinel, 36. Also charged is office administrator Chris Evans, 56.

The men reported to the Fulton County Jail after arrest warrants were obtained by the GBI in connection with an ongoing investigation into misappropriation of funds and resources from the school’s Georgia Electronic Design Center, GBI spokesman John Bankhead said Saturday.

As part of the investigation, the GBI executed search warrants on May 17 that included nine locations on campus as well as two residences, said Bankhead.

Laskar’s attorney Craig Gillen said his client and Georgia Tech were business partners. He said the school took advantage of Laskar’s brilliance in the field of microchips.

“He and his team had founded a company that had perfected a chip that might well be worth millions and millions of dollars. Now, Georgia Tech had a piece of that… Apparently they wanted more,” Gillen told Channel 2’s Richard Belcher.

The Bayh-Dole Act has led to some strange outcomes in various places. BTW, Gatorade’s inventors at University of Florida had major legal issues in the past. Though those were fights over profits.

As the lawyer for the professor points out, the chip ‘might’ be worth ‘millions and millions’ — meaning the fight here is over funds for growth, not from profits. Gatorade was worth hundreds of millions when the legal battles ramped up.

Again, thought I’d share some of the darker side of campus entrepreneurship in this entry.

via Tech professor, 2 others face $2 million racketeering charge  | ajc.com.

Russia Campus Entrepreneur (Tetris) Celebrates 25 Years

In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov was working at the Computing Center of the Moscow Academy of Sciences as a computer engineer when he created the game Tetris (h/t Geek Dad). The Academy of Sciences employed top academics from across the Soviet Union. The game was first available in Russia in 1985 and made it to the west in 1986.

Pajitnov, as a citizen of the Soviet Union and an employee of the state made no money off of the game. According to  Curtis Silver of Wired:

As we all know, a young Alexey Pajitnov created the game while working for the Moscow Academy of Sciences. If you didn’t know that, I mentioned it in the previous paragraph. The rights to the game were owned at that time by the Motherland Russia herself, as it was created under a communist state. Eventually word spread like wildfire across the early BBS boards and the fledgling internet that this game was simply the best, most of us just didn’t quite know it yet. Then in 1989 a company you may have heard of packaged the game (paying the Motherland for rights) with their Gameboy hand held system. Nintendo was looking for a game that wasn’t Super Mario, that wasn’t Zelda – that was something that every type of gamer could enjoy. They found it in Tetris Since then, over 125 million different versions of the game have been sold.