Category Archives: IP

Non-technology transfer exploitation of university patents

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica reports on a patent dispute between Yahoo and Facebook.  Yahoo filed a patent infringement case against Facebook in March, and now Facebook has acquired 10 patents from patent accumulators–otherwise called trolls or non-operating entities–to assert … Continue reading →

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Mapping Invention Portfolio Expectations

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

What is the shape of the unknown?  One might think, well, if it’s unknown, then how can we know?  And yet we work with the unknown all the time.  In this series of essays, a lot of my work has … Continue reading →

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Present Assignment Agreements, the Coming Nightmare for University IP Practice

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

This turned out to be a longish essay for a blog environment. It’s not for everyone. It puts together arguments against the idea that present assignments somehow address the Stanford v Roche situation, or situations like it, or are otherwise … Continue reading →

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Why an Innovation Bill of Rights, and not Better Bureaukleptic University Policy?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

I’m looking at a new article on Stanford v Roche that ends with the assurance that universities can use present assignments and doing so will “fix” their ownership problem.  Before getting into the article, I want to emphasize that this … Continue reading →

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Stevenson-Wydler and Public Domain

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

In working through the agent model anticipated by Bayh-Dole, I was chasing down the citations for each of the possible outcomes.  The one that caught me up, however, was how a subject invention gets to the public domain.  I thought … Continue reading →

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A compulsory policy so messed up, it must be voluntary!

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

11.  The present assignment is so incompetently constructed it boggles the mind. In a prior post, I included the above in a list of problems with UW’s implementation of present assignments. I added this one because, well, UW’s “goes to … Continue reading →

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Shanzhai Rules

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Gerald Barnett

Over at the LinkedIn Post-Industrial Design group, there’s a little discussion started by Matt Sinclair on a report called The Future of Open Fabrication from the Institute For the Future. The report calls out the Shanzhai approach to manufacturing in … Continue reading →

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CU’s a-Mazing IP Policy

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Gerald Barnett

In the University of Colorado’s IP policy we have a simple gesture that turns into a definitional and drafting maze.  The simple gesture is, “In an effort to make money licensing patent rights, the university requires the assignment of patentable … Continue reading →

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Evaluating university claims of invention ownership

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Gerald Barnett

I am working through this idea that an invention is owned by a university merely as the result of work within the scope of employment or through the use of university facilities (and resources and funding and whatever–class 3 unknown). … Continue reading →

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An Exclusive Enjoyment

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Gerald Barnett

This case (US v Dubilier Condenser) from 1933 makes an interesting point regarding the idea of a patent as a “monopoly” (citations removed, my bold): Though often so characterized a patent is not, accurately speaking, a monopoly, for it is … Continue reading →

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