I believe this article is naive. We live in a world of competitive innovation for commercial benefit and universities and private research institutions are in the thick of it. We are competing in a real world and not in a vacuum of idealism. Darwinian principles apply to this world.
I speak as one who has just returned from visiting an overseas company employing 15,000 people in its high-tech factories and laboratories. I could not develop a patent here despite my best intentions and spending three years trying. I also had a prototype made in China in a week after trying for six months in Australia with some local government help.
If we are to develop a Nokia or Hewlett Packard in this country, we will have to use all the guile we can to keep our ideas protected by international patent conventions. Only then will we be able to provide our children promising futures and not dependant on our mining quarries.
The company I visited funds a TAFE to train the next generation of hi-tech workers for the future of that company and university town.