Category Archives: Commons

Choose Your Open Source License

There’s a useful guide at GitHub for choosing an open source license. The guide presents a developer with three distinct options: These capture three common, primary concerns that show up once one has made the decision to be open with … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole, the franken-sausage god

The full title is: Bayh-Dole, the franken-sausage god that destroyed private initiative and the federal research commons, eliminated subvention from university research policy and failed to create a public covenant to use research inventions to develop new products and create new industries … Continue reading

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Subject Patent Exhaustion

Caltech has just sued Apple for infringement of a patent. The patent in question, “Serial concatenation of interleaved convolutional codes forming turbo-like codes” (US Patent No. 7,116,710) includes this statement of government interest: GOVERNMENT LICENSE RIGHTS The U.S. Government has … Continue reading

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The Purpose of the Patent System for University Research

There is a general argument that the patent is a pretty useful cultural tool to stimulate and reward technological innovation. The owner of a patent has the right to exclude others from practicing (making, having made, using, selling, offering for … Continue reading

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Dealing with Norming Myths

There’s a new study out at Future Internet that looks at how Wikipedia’s norms have developed over the years. In “The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network,” Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeo examine Wikipedia’s form of governance and find it to … Continue reading

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How Bayh-Dole dammed, and then damned, the commons

This is the third article in a series. The first is here. The second, here. The motivating driver of the Bayh-Dole Act, if we can be blunt, was to put the affiliated research foundations in a position to keep with impunity any … Continue reading

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The Cork in the Keg: Open Source Software Complies with Bayh-Dole But University Invention Practice Often Does Not

Over on Daniel S. Katz’s blog there’s a discussion of university policies and open source software. The issue of Bayh-Dole came up, and I provided a comment there. I’m reposting here, with links and a few typos and awkwardnesses fixed. The … Continue reading

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Four approaches to university IP management

It may be useful to map out four approaches to university IP management: Personal Entrepreneurial Institutional Open The discussion below does not advocate for one approach over the others, though compulsory institutional IP management seems not to have worked all … Continue reading

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Tesla's Patent Move That Universities Must Also Make

Tesla Motors, the electric car manufacturer, has released all of its patents to its competitors. A search at the USPTO for patents and patent applications assigned to Tesla Motors returns 169 issued US patents and 231 published applications. No doubt … Continue reading

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The University Conversion Experience, Part 2

In Part I of “The University Conversion Experience” I described the problems faced when an organization supported by a university becomes trapped in claims by the university administration that the university owns the organization for having supported it. In Part … Continue reading

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