Category Archives: Bayh-Dole

Life in the fast lane surely make you lose your infringement case

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Gerald Barnett

Here is a simple question: Can a university sue for infringement of a patent on a subject invention? Clearly, one answer is “of course”–universities do so all the time, often playing the troll or the jilted lover. Let’s put the question another way: Does … Continue reading →

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Bayh-Dole, the bureaucratic solution to massive federal funding of faculty research

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Gerald Barnett

Prior to 1912, university faculty generally did not seek patents. Cottrell at the University of California created Research Corporation to act as an external agent to present his and other faculty members’ inventions to industry. The Board of Research Corporation … Continue reading →

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University monopoly IP practices kill the very thing they claim to seek

Posted on January 16, 2016 by Gerald Barnett

Although the Bayh-Dole Act is placed in US patent law, it actually makes few changes to patent law, as the US Supreme Court made clear in the Stanford v. Roche decision. Bayh-Dole largely forces federal agencies to adopt a uniform … Continue reading →

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Some Questions from a Future FAQ on Bayh-Dole

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Gerald Barnett

Q. Can a university violate the Bayh-Dole Act? A. No. Bayh-Dole applies to federal agencies. The law requires federal agencies to adopt uniform practices regarding patent rights to inventions in funding agreements. Bayh-Dole (now) authorizes the Department of Commerce to … Continue reading →

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Cornell’s incompetent "procedural revision" of its patent policy

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

In 2013, Robert A. Burhman, Vice President for Technology Transfer at Cornell University, sent a letter out to faculty making a claim about Stanford v. Roche: As you may also know, and as discussed in more detail at the end of this … Continue reading →

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Can’t you see what Wisconsin has been doin’ to free?

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

In the summer of 1981, the Bayh-Dole Act went into effect, launching a tsunami that would sweep away the existing infrastructure for faculty-led use of patents to develop research discoveries. In its place, thirty-five years later, sits a manager-led system … Continue reading →

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Bayh-Dole was written for the research foundations. Pity for us all that it didn’t work out.

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

After I wrote the previous article, it struck me that the origins of Bayh-Dole really are with the affiliated research foundations trying to license patents to industry, not with the universities, and not even with Research Corporation (which remained neutral … Continue reading →

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How Bayh-Dole failed to protect faculty inventors (from university administrators)

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

[Now with some revisions in the second paragraph that on reflection were worth making.] There are a number of things wrong with the Bayh-Dole Act, such as the lack of accountability for the disposition of privately held patents on inventions … Continue reading →

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Come in from the cold

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

In The Economist for August 8, there’s an article on the problem of patents. The article questions the utility of patents and points to a number of situations in which patents appear to block innovation or have nothing to do … Continue reading →

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The Legal Context of University IP, Part 2 Revisited

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

In 2010, the National Academies and the National Research Council published a commissioned a report–The Legal Context of University Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer by Sean O’Connor, Gregory D. Graff, and David E. Winickoff. Here are comments on the findings of … Continue reading →

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