Patenting algorithms

The Health Discovery Corporation announced that they hold several patents on the support vector machines. According to this source (not verified) the company has started a patent enforcement strategy. They are asking licensing fees from universities for publishing and using support vector machines. If such a practice is true, then the academic progress in machine learning is threatened. Everybody is free to judge the ethics of this practice and the people who are participating in it. Professors, students and potential employees have to realize that every time the interact with Health Discovery Corporation are associated with its policies.