One can see, then, where Bayh-Dole comes into play in this meaningless mess. Bayh-Dole was drafted by the same folks who created the IPA system. The IPA system was shut down in 1978 as ineffective and contrary to public policy. Bayh-Dole emerged the next year, slogged through Congress, failed, and then was revived, tacked onto a bill to make technical changes to federal patent law, and passed in a lame-duck session as a parting gift to Senator Bayh, who had lost his re-election campaign. Bayh-Dole was given the appearance of doing what the IPA program had done.
Norman Latker, the NIH patent counsel that had developed the IPA program, had a hand in the Nixon patent policy revisions of the Kennedy patent policy, and then had a hand in drafting the Federal Procurement Regulation that codified the Nixon patent policy (because the Nixon patent policy had added this requirement for codification, by perhaps total coincidence), wrote later that Bayh-Dole was based on the IPA program. Really, Bayh-Dole was based on the Federal Procurement Regulation, not the IPA program, but because the FPR, which become effective in 1975, was designed to create the opportunity to expand the IPA program government wide, really Bayh-Dole was constructed out of parts of the IPA and FPR, a sort of franken law raised from the dead to serve university patent administrators. Continue reading