Category Archives: History

Learning from Latker’s 1984 “Federal Initiatives for Innovation” Talk, 3

Norman Latker, formerly patent counsel at the NIH and chief architect of Bayh-Dole and its extension by Presidential memorandum to all federal contracting, argues that if federal inventions are not privately owned and exploited for their exclusionary and financial value, … Continue reading

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Learning from Latker’s 1984 “Federal Initiatives for Innovation” Talk, 2

Let’s return to Norman Latker’s talk from 1984, “Federal Initiatives for Innovation.” Keep in mind, Latker drafted the IPA master agreement, the Bayh-Dole Act, Reagan’s 1983 memorandum that displaced the Kennedy and Nixon patent policies, the 1984 amendments to Bayh-Dole … Continue reading

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Senator Nelson on the problem of “public interest” in federal patent policy, 2

The federal public policy for inventions made in federally funded work then becomes “whatever the contractor that hosts the work chooses to do, so long as the contractor files a patent application.” In Bayh-Dole, there’s no federal review of a … Continue reading

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Senator Nelson on the problem of “public interest” in federal patent policy, 1

The “public interest” plays an important role in federal invention policy. In 1963, President Kennedy announced a policy that permitted nonprofit organizations to request to retain title to inventions made in federally funded work, providing that Where the commercial interests … Continue reading

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Learning from Latker’s 1984 “Federal Initiatives for Innovation” Talk

In 1984 Norman Latker, who as NIH patent counsel drafted the Bayh-Dole Act on the sly, gave a talk (“Federal Initiatives For Innovation“) to the American Intellectual Property Association. At the time, Latker worked for the Department of Commerce, and … Continue reading

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The Faculty Stack, 3: Linking Federal Resources with Free Play

We are working through the idea that faculty independence is an important element in the justification to push federal funding for research activities to universities. For Vannevar Bush, the idea was that the frontiers of science were best explored by … Continue reading

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Latker Here, There, and Everywhere in Bayh-Dole

Norman J. Latker is the architect of present federal patent policy. Let’s work through his resume. It provides a remarkable tale of persistent influence leading to the unenforced, innovation-stagnating, dismal-performance (but it’s all kept secret, by law) Bayh-Dole Act. Latker … Continue reading

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The faculty stack, 2: Basic Research and IP Policy

The idea I will pursue here is that university faculty represent a distinct and important kind of discoverer–researcher, investigator, noodler, gadgeteer, irrelevanteur, loon. Our search for what we cannot imagine depends in having at least some really capable folks out … Continue reading

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For Latker, Bayh-Dole wins a political battle over delivery of research to the public

In February 1974, Norman J. Latker, patent counsel for the NIH, gave a talk in Chicago with the title “Progress Towards a Uniform U.S. Government Patent Policy for Universities and Non-Profit Organizations.” You can find most of it at IP … Continue reading

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Unenforced, Bayh-Dole enables a federal offer to look the other way on price-gouging

The government’s failure to use its government license to practice and have practiced (=make, use, and sell) puts undue pressure on march-in to address nonuse and unreasonable use of inventions arising in work receiving federal support. NIST wants to gut … Continue reading

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