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Category Archives: History
How I got into this mess
I got my start in university technology transfer as a graduate student at the University of Washington. I was working toward a doctorate in literature and interpretation. My dissertation dealt with the representation of text, using medieval manuscripts as a … Continue reading
Posted in History, Technology Transfer
Tagged distributed distribution, Feyerabend, Piers, research enterprise, technology transfer
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Bayh-Dole has dropped commercialization rates from 25% to 0.5%: what more can we expect?
University licensing programs appear to have about a 0.5% commercialization rate. That is, of all the assets reported to them which they claim, only 1 in 200 (or less) actually results in a commercial product (without regard to the “success” … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, Commons, History, Metrics, Policy
Tagged Bayh-Dole, commercialization, Harbridge House, licensing, Picasso
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What’s uniform and what should never be, Part 5
If there’s no need for the federal government to make money from patent positions, and the federal government transfers the administration of these patents to universities, then universities also have no need to make money from these patent positions. They … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Policy, Sponsored Research
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What’s uniform and what should never be, Part 4
[I have expanded the first section to fill out the difference between acquiring the federal government’s right of ownership in subject inventions and the federal government giving up on having an ownership interest in subject inventions–muddling this distinction is at … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Policy, Sponsored Research
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What’s uniform and what should never be, Part 3
There are, then, three entry points for the IPA approach re-established by Norm Latker at HEW in 1968. First, an agency may allow a university to acquire rights at the time of contracting at the agency director’s discretion–if doing so is … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Policy, Sponsored Research
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What’s uniform and what should never be, Part 2
In 1963, President Kennedy created a government-wide federal policy to address when and how federal agencies might consider allowing patent rights to remain with a contractor–any contractor, not just universities, and under any contract–not just procurement but also grants-in-aid or subventions. From … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Metrics, Sponsored Research, Uncategorized
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What’s uniform and what should never be, Part 1
One of the common description of the Bayh-Dole Act is that it established “uniform” federal patent policy: Enacted on December 12, 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act (P.L. 96-517, Patent and Trademark Act Amendments of 1980) created a uniform patent policy among the many federal agencies that … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Sponsored Research
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The Llorts of Bayh-Dole
In July, Setareh Samii published “The Importance of the Bayh-Dole Act” at The Catalyst, a web site operated by PhRMA. Samii argues that Bayh-Dole “created a framework for technology transfer that helped rejuvenate the American economy.” Samii then proceeds to … Continue reading
Actual reduction to practice
In working through some of the legislative background to the failed effort to make the IPA template government-wide, I came across a curious passage in testimony attributed to the Library of Congress Research Service. The Service was addressing the issue … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Sponsored Research
Tagged conception, Feynman, IPA, reduction to practice
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Behind the Usual Narrative, Part V
Universities Help to Make the Problem Universities created the federal contracting mess for basic research by insisting that the federal government not concentrate contracting authority in a single agency set up specifically for providing grants under the most liberal patent … Continue reading
Posted in Bayh-Dole, History, Policy, Sponsored Research
Tagged Bush, IPA, Latker, uniform patent policy
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