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Category Archives: Freedom
Principalities of Patenting
I am working through the ways in which a university comes to acquire patent rights from faculty inventors. This is turning into a series of articles. This stuff isn’t easy–but then, as far as I can tell, it’s not easy … Continue reading
Posted in Freedom, Policy, Social Science, Technology Transfer
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A university's innovation policy depends on academic freedom
Build your innovation policy around academic freedom. The distinctive advantage of a university faculty member is that she or he has access to institutional resources (and so does not have to grub for them personally) but is free from institutional … Continue reading
The Status of University Patent Policy
What is the status of a university patent policy? Or, put it another way, how does it come about that a university can force faculty and students to give up ownership of their personal property–patentable inventions–property that inventors own by … Continue reading
Posted in Agreements, Freedom, Policy
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Faculty IP and Academic Freedom, Part I
I am working out how to disrupt the now-pervasive use of management-speak to describe the obligations of university faculty with regard to intellectual property they produce–largely, almost entirely their personal intellectual property, by operation of federal copyright and patent law, prior … Continue reading
Banging Our Hearts Against the Wall
Now that an arguably effective national infrastructure for dealing with inventions made by university faculty has been systematically dismantled over three decades in favor of institutionally self-serving patent administration, it is difficult to see a road back to pre-Bayh-Dole management. … Continue reading
Posted in Freedom, History, Policy
Tagged Bayh-Dole, new way forward, policy wall., Research Corporation, technology transfer
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The University of Michigan Mess of an Old Patent Policy, Part IV
In a series of three articles (here, here, and here), I showed how the University of Michigan intellectual property policy apparatus managed–or didn’t manage–patents and copyrights. One problem is Regents Bylaw 3.10. The Bylaw sets out conditions under which it is … Continue reading
The University of Michigan’s Mess of a Copyright Policy, Part III
Part I of this series looked at the University of Michigan 1944 patent policy and its transmogrified afterlife as Regents Bylaw 3.10, and the strange Supplemental Appointment Information invention present assignment document that claims to derive from Bylaw 3.10. Part … Continue reading
Posted in Bozonet, Freedom, IP, Policy, Present Assignment
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Come in from the cold
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
F-B-D.
Gene Quinn’s opinion piece got me thinking some more about how Bayh-Dole really must go. I agree with Quinn’s analysis of some critics of Bayh-Dole. The criticisms Mr. Quinn criticizes are indeed silly. There are much more damning weaknesses in … Continue reading
We are sure you will adopt this discovery faster now that it comes with a patent and a bureaucrat!
In Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend examines cultural variety and considers the problem of the “objective” claims of science in the broader context of whether any given society consistently benefits from scientific objectivism, given how often science is wrong, how … Continue reading
Posted in Freedom, Policy, Technology Transfer
Tagged bureaucrat, capital asset, cargo cult, Feyerabend, patent
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