Category Archives: History

The IPA Public Covenant

[revised to add a discussion of Kennedy’s patent policy statement and distinguish it from COGR’s account of it; added an account of the various federal agency approaches to ownership of inventions] Advocates for Bayh-Dole practice odd forms of historical revisionism. … Continue reading

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Faux Bayh-Dole Central

The Association of University Technology Managers sponsored “Bayh-Dole Central,” (now the “Bayh-Dole History and Research Central”), a site hosted by the University of New Hampshire School of Law and devoted to the Bayh-Dole Act. There you can find all sorts … Continue reading

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They just can’t kill the beast

After the Supreme Court ruled in Stanford v Roche, Joe Allen and Howard Bremer wrote an article (“After Stanford v Roche: Bayh-Dole Still Stands“) in which they asserted that they had argued against the idea that Bayh-Dole vested with contractors … 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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Vannevar Bush’s seductive lie

At The New Atlantis, Dan Sarewitz has published an interesting article, “Saving Science.” While there’s plenty to discuss regarding his major theme, that scientists “must come out of the lab into the real world,” here I’d like to deal with a … Continue reading

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Three once-concerns regarding university patents

Historically, there have been three areas of concern for the limitation of university involvement in patenting: (1) the monopoly effect of IP, (2) worrisome commercial behaviors, and (3) the problem of money as an apparent motivation. In the past, when university inventors … Continue reading

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Cockroach Living in Technology Transfer

I didn’t intend to end up in university technology transfer, but I fell down a rabbit hole and here I still am. I have seen university technology transfer from both sides now. For 12 years, I worked for the University … Continue reading

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The Very Model of a Modern University IP Policy Preamble

Recently, I have worked through intellectual property policies at Michigan and Texas. No university administrator is willing to write “We demand to own your work to try to make money, preferably by partnering with monopolist speculators.” That would violate the … Continue reading

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From provider to predator: University of Texas patent policy, Part 3

In Part 2 of this series I compared the preambles of the 1977 and 1988 versions of the University of Texas System patent-cum-intellectual property policies. The 1946 policy was so straightforward that it did not need a preamble. It was … Continue reading

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Science at the Frontier and the Effect of the Linear Model

In Science the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush proposed federal funding to universities to expand the frontiers of science. Folks these days focus on the science part of Bush’s proposal and his advocacy for funding research at universities. They skip over the idea … Continue reading

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