Some patent policies in effect in 1962, with the date of most recent revision.
From the preamble to the New Mexico State University research and patent policy, 1960:
Discoveries and inventions which appear as a natural product of original work should be made available in the public interest under conditions that will promote their effective development and beneficial utilization, but the potential gain from royalties or other compensation should never be allowed to influence programs of scientific research nor should such expectations be allowed to regulate support of academic investigation.
Harvard, 1934:
No patents primarily concerned with therapeutics or public health may be taken out by any member of the University, except with the consent of the President and Fellows; nor will such patents be taken out by the University itself except for dedication to the public. The President and Fellows will provide legal advice to any member of the University who desires steps to be taken to prevent the patenting by others of such discoveries or inventions.
Johns Hopkins University, 1948:
The ownership and administration of patents by the University is believed undesirable.
University of Chicago, 1954:
The basic policies of the University of Chicago include complete freedom of research and the unrestricted dissemination of information. Research done primarily in anticipation of profit is incompatible with the aims of the University.
University of Southern California, 1961:
It is not a policy of the University to seek nor to encourage specifically the development of patents of commercial value or to engage in their exploitation.
Columbia University, 1944:
These inventions are often worthy of patent application and some ultimately may be patented. However, it is not deemed with the sphere of the University’s scholarly objectives to assert claim to ownership in or seek control over such inventions or discoveries.
City College (NY), 1957:
The purpose of contract research on any of the municipal campuses shall not be purposefully or primarily directed toward the development of patentable products or processes.
Rutgers University, 1949:
The University retains no proprietary interest in any invention by a member of its staff. It neither owns patents nor does it accept assignment of any patent rights.
University of Pennsylvania, 1941:
The Trustees have declared it to be the policy of the University of Pennsylvania that any invention or discovery which may in any manner affect the public health, such as a new drug, process or apparatus intended primarily for medical or surgical use, shall not be patented for profit, either by an individual in the employ of the University or by the University itself. However, in order to prevent the capitalization and exploitation by others of any such discoveries or inventions and in order to protect the public, the Executive Board may consider it advisable from time to time to patent such inventions or discoveries with the sole intention of protection without profit.
Cornell University, 1952:
The securing of patents on new devices or processes primarily for the personal profit of members of the staff is unwise public policy and might jeopardize the continuation of public support. Patents however should be taken out whenever necessary to protect the public by control of quality and by insuring a reasonable price for the patented product.
And now for something completely different, from the Washington state “STARS” program web site:
Strategically Targeted Academic Researchers, STARS, began in 2007. Washington state provides support for recruitment of entrepreneurial researchers to Washington, bringing individuals with the knowledge, skills and ability to generate research products and innovations with direct commercial applications. The program fosters both product innovation and longer‐term statewide economic development.
The University of Washington, of course, claims ownership of everything these and other faculty produce, with a plan on file to try to make as much money as possible–millions!–from these inventions, preferably by stuffing patents into startups to be flipped from clever investors to less clever ones before anyone figures out what’s up (an exact quote follows):
Ordinarily, we might not place emphasize revenue, but in the current fiscal environment, the university must focus on generating sufficient revenue to support its operations and initiatives. Without adequate funding, UW will not be the best anything. Commercialization is one of the few identified potential new sources of badly needed funding.
and (again, this is prose in an official plan from a licensing office that has spent about $100m in five years being “resource intensive”):
Technology transfers offices traditionally focus on less resource intensive, less economically risky licensing of technology to (often large, and out of state) existing companies. C4C focuses resources on attempting to increase the number of companies spinning out of UW around UW innovations/IP. We see start ups as having a greater potential for creating revenue, good will, and reputational gain UW and WA. They can generate licensing revenue–if acquired, nearer term than do royalties (UW receives equity as a condition of license), create jobs, enhance UW’s reputation (think of the benefit to Stanford of being known to have launched Google), and generate many other benefits to UW–which is why we encourage C4C results to be analyzed from a “total contribution” perspective.
It’s rather interesting what fifty years can do to a state’s interest in the conduct of faculty-led research, not to mention its tolerance for abysmal writing. What has changed? Are folks now more practical and determined? Or are they just more crass?
I find strange, even a bit offensive, in the STARS program description the idea that the University of Washington and Washington State University are somehow so lacking of entrepreneurial faculty that the state legislature has to fund the importation of these kinds of folks from other states and countries, tasking them to invent so that these universities can take out patent positions to make money. It is as if the state can just go out and get folks, plop them down with a tiny lab budget and wait for them to lay golden eggs to save the state’s economy. Utah’s USTAR program, on which Washington’s STARS program is based (who could tell, from the names?), spent $93m over 5 years and could identify 4 companies and 13 employees as a result. When they wrote up the economics report, they didn’t even bother to consider the economic impact of the effort and substituted instead the economic contribution of the spending–that is, what does spending $93m mean in the context of all the other spending in the state? Answer: next to nothing.
The STARS program is a great machine in which millions have gone in with trumpets a-blaring for good intentions, and why nothing, nothing at all comes out. The University of Washington has been reduced to fabricating statistics to make its program appear to be “successful”–grossly garbled patent counts, floating press stories calling companies startups that aren’t startups and startups from a decade ago “recent,” not bothering to mention that of the few semi-recent university-affiliated companies getting rounds of funding and attention, some have relocated to other states, where they are doing their manufacturing and adding jobs.
The university folks in the 1930s, and 40s, and 50s, and 60s were every bit as attuned to innovation and the possibilities of university discoveries and inventions. Hewlett and Packard were the star graduate students of the day, like Brin and Page now. Vannevar Bush writes about how American university faculty rallied during the second world war. The 50s saw Bush’s vision of a national research foundation take shape in the form of the National Science Foundation–the national role of Research Corporation, but fueled by government dollars rather than industry invention royalty dollars. The 60s saw the space race, computers, semiconductors–all with tremendous contribution from universities. Through it all, the green revolution, the rise of wonder drugs, too. There was not any doubt that universities were a place of innovation. And in it all, university administrators and faculty took a stand, not because they were in “ivory towers” but because becoming crass chasers of rainbows would be the thing that would take them away from innovating and “debase” the environment in which all this neat stuff was happening. Even President Eisenhower warned against the loss of research independence:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is perhaps a sign of the times that by 2007 the Washington state legislature could be persuaded to import a few entrepreneurial types to save the state’s economy through “innovation,” ignoring the invention policies of the state’s universities, which had turned crass and debased, doing just what university leaders had warned against in their policies: research for profit, monopoly interests at all the wrong times, institutional diversion of attention from the research to the profiting from research. In a word, stagnation. It’s not that there isn’t still discovery–oh, look at all those patents! But there’s also some concern that when all the universities swarm together and destroy much of the commons that they previously supported, each one holding white-knuckled to a portfolio of patents it hopes will attract monopoly enterprises, that there is a consequence in the real world for the effects of such efforts.
Somewhere in the last fifty years, and especially after Bayh-Dole, universities began losing their voice of stewardship and threw in with the idea of making money from patent positions, declaring it all in the public interest, yeah, that’s it, the public interest. It really doesn’t matter what the stated intention is. It is the consequences of the actions that matter. And those consequences are not what is being spun up in reports as “success.” Those reports never mention all the claimed and unlicensed, unworked, inventions that are the ghosts of innovation–unworked because claimed institutionally and dedicated to a monopoly licensing model that in general has failed. No amount of “marketing” can correct for such a failed architecture. The failure is moral as well as structural. Perhaps what the university leaders of the past understood is that the role of the university in leading research is not to suck up to power and worship money, but to establish a voice independent of such things. Perhaps that is when research hosted at universities really shines, and contributes in its most effective way to innovation.