There is advice out and around that the lesson of Stanford v. Roche is to always use “hereby assigns” rather than “agrees to assign” in employment contracts dealing with patent rights. For universities, it’s not good advice. First, it misses the point of the case. Second, it doesn’t work any better under Bayh-Dole. Third, it is bad public policy to turn creative, independent, often sloshingly fun university research faculty into corporate slaves working for administrators consumed with accumulating patent rights for money–or worse, turning inventors into drones for the sake of some paper process to make administrators look good, confirm the orderliness of following rules made by committee, and otherwise pretend that fairness = screw everyone equally with bozonet rules.
Meanwhile the legal profession has mostly rushed to help university administrators get a grip, rather than to help inventors break free. Why is that? When has a bunch of bureaucrats ever been looked to as the shining light of innovation in research? Why now? Surely that is not the vision of Bayh-Dole.