Well, I guess the UC present assignment doesn’t have to be, technically, a change in policy. It could be simply a violation of policy. Note that in the UC Patent Policy, we have this:
An agreement to assign inventions and patents to the University, except those resulting from permissible consulting activities without use of University facilities, shall be mandatory for all employees, for persons not employed by the University but who use University research facilities, and for those who receive gift, grant, or contract funds through the University. Such an agreement may be in the form of an acknowledgment of obligation to assign.
Policy provides for an agreement to assign. It does not provide for a present assignment, as Arizona’s policy does, nor does it authorize an acknowledgment of present assignment, but rather of an obligation to assign, which at the point of employment, where the patent acknowledgment is presently positioned in UC practice, has to be regarding inventions in the future–that is, a promise to assign.
It could be, then, that I am wrong when I say that the move to present assignments is a change in policy. Clearly, no *policy* document has been changed! Only the *acknowledgement* document, which is not *policy* but the implementation of *policy*. If the requirement to make a present assignment of all unspecified future inventions prior to any review is not a change in policy, then it would appear to be a willful move to ignore the policy, or if one wanted to be extraordinary graceful about it, to interpret the policy in an unexpected way that could be construed as overstepping the agreement that the present patent acknowledgment records. The agreement is not the thing on paper, it is what the parties to the agreement reasonably believe the paper memorializes.
Thus, it may well be that the UC move to present assignment is not a change in policy, but rather a disregarding of policy. In that way, UC folks perhaps are correct, though not particularly candid, in stating that the change is not a change in policy.