The paper that this is based on is also pretty fascinating: Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/
Well, in my opinion, a patent like this is well deserved. I could be wrong, but the researchers have spent significant time on it and have discovered/invented something really unique.
that's the tragedy of it. something cool is invented and now it'll be fenced off and buried for 25 years in all likelihood, and/or becomes part of a big patent portfolio.
No, a patent implies that you publicly disclose the knowledge behind your discovery immediately, in exchange for the property of this knowledge being guaranteed† to be yours for a limited time, and its use guaranteed to become free when this time runs out.
The alternative is not to disclose it, with the risk for you that nobody will reverse engineer or discover by themselves, or the risk for everyone else that this knowledge could be lost forever.
† pending approval, and unless successfully challenged in court (where the patent applies).
ICBW, but no, I don't think it does, except it perhaps a narrow set of circumstances.
Compulsory Licensing[1] is maybe what you're thinking of, but from what I can tell seems to apply mostly to drug patents, or things {the,a} government wants from you. It has a wider applicability in copyrighted forms of IP, I believe.
Patents that are part of some organised standard are often required to be placed under 'FRAND[2] (Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory)' compulsory licences to allow for interoperability whilst still allowing the patent holder to receive (reasonable) royalties if they wish.
It would be more correct to say that "patents that their owners contribute to some organised standard ..."
If I add a patented process to an important standard, but I don't own the patents, you still don't get those patents just because they are part of some important standard.
They only grant the right to exclude others from doing something.
So if i own a patent on X, it gives me the right to prevent others from doing X.
Even if i license my patent on X to you, it does not necessarily mean you can do X, because doing X may also require other patents that my patent is an extension of.
In other words:
Imagine we have patented processes, each building on the last.
Patent A covers doing thing one
Patent B covers doing thing one, then thing two
Patent C covers doing thing one, then thing two, then thing three.
Granting you only the right to perform patent C does not enable you to perform the process described by patent C, you'd still need licenses for patent B and patent A to do that.
