While there is a place for exclusive patent licensing (but why not just assign?), the university screws over its public mission by involving itself in exclusive deals. Just because those deals aren’t obvious to the public unless they make big money for the university and it brags it up doesn’t mean that the deals are healthy for the university. My observation goes further–merely the attempt to do exclusive deals, merely leaving the lingering expectation that a university might attempt to do an exclusive deal, is damaging to a university’s public role, to the public’s sense that a university is doing what it ought.
And that damage–from the expectation a university might deal a patent exclusively, might try to make money on the value of suppressing use, suppressing improvements, suppressing applications, might set up some single company to troll industry, to set up that company to sue on behalf of the university, to shake down those that would otherwise benefit from access to the invention–that damage runs through all the inventions that the university holds.
The damage takes the form of lost relationships, lost goodwill, lost gifting and sponsored research income, a stench of public betrayal and betrayal of university claims to ethical practice, disruption of industries rather than service to those industries, withering of rainmakracketeering using patents, ineffective technology transfer, and perhaps worser of all, motivating companies that do not expect or want an exclusive license to design around university inventions, or avoid those inventions, to exclude those inventions from industry roadmaps, to delay adoption. And those behaviors render university research and billions of federal research dollars (treated as pork) irrelevant, useless–at least until the patents lapse.
Institutions never apologize. Universities say technology transfer is hard, but they don’t bother to consider how their own stupid policies (no, really, I’ve read hundreds of those policies–most of them are stupidly written, just mind bendingly stupid–and they are so stupid, Dunning-Kruger style, that they can’t even see it) and the stupid ineffective practices they use following those policies (policies may expect money-making from licensing, but I haven’t seen a policy yet that fixes the default position to be exclusive licensing even though that is, everywhere, the default university practice). Yes, their stupid choices for policy and practice make technology transfer all that much more difficult. But to a bureaucracy that’s dumb, life getting harder means better pay, bigger budgets (to comply!), more empire, more status. If technology transfer appeared easy, why then you wouldn’t need to spend a few million a year on staffing the office.
My argument is that if you got rid of your patent and invention policy altogether, then you could cut your technology transfer budget by over half, run the office as a voluntary service if anyone still wants it (there are reasons to have folks who can help with IP when it makes sense for the university to serve as curator or escrow or aggregator for a commons or consortium). Continue reading →
