Category Archives: Policy

IP Laws for Dragons

On Quora, I was asked to answer this question: Do US intellectual property laws stills serve society or just corporations and countries that are large and rich? Historically, patents have been the domain of countries (and city states) and the … Continue reading

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WARF, Vitamin D, and the Public Interest, 3

The appeals court in Vitamin Technologists sets up the case for compulsory licensing of inventions owned by public universities as instruments of state governments. That is, the appeals court establishes the basis for public march-in when a state owns a … Continue reading

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WARF, Vitamin D, and the Public Interest, 2

We have worked through a 1945 appeals court reasoning about the University of Wisconsin’s president’s refusal to allow the licensing of an invention beneficial to public health for use in food products that might compete with State of Wisconsin dairy … Continue reading

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WARF, Vitamin D, and the Public Interest, 1

In the 1940s, WARF was basking in the income from licensing its flagship patents–on a way to irradiate food products to produce in them vitamin D. (For an interesting account with lots of details, see Rima D. Apple, a University … Continue reading

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Shaping Science

A short version of a Research Enterprise article on Daniel Sarewitz’s “Saving Science” is posted as correspondence at The New Atlantis, where Sarewitz also responds to various comments on his paper. In part, Sarewitz gathers some of those comments into … Continue reading

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The monopoly meme, 5

Now let’s turn to the Bayh-Dole Act and see how it works with the monopoly meme. Short form, if you don’t want to bother, is that Bayh-Dole doesn’t follow the monopoly meme in its gestures, but because these gestures never … Continue reading

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The monopoly meme, 4

We are nearing the end of examining Howard Bremer’s Senate subcommittee testimony from 1979 on a bill that was remarkably like Bayh-Dole. Bremer’s testimony is useful in helping us get at the rhetorical effect of the monopoly meme–that without a … Continue reading

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The monopoly meme, 3

We are working through Howard Bremer’s testimony before a Senate subcommittee with regard to a bill remarkably like what would become Bayh-Dole. The point is to explore how the monopoly meme works in practice. Bremer gives nine principles that ought … Continue reading

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Federally supported inventions and public trusts

In 1933, the Supreme Court considered a claim by the United States that two employees of the National Bureau of Standards must give up a patent they had obtained on improvements to radio technology (United States v Dubilier Condenser Corp). … Continue reading

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Ten Year Note

Ten years ago, on September 4, 2008, I started the Research Enterprise blog. My idea was to use the blog to document what I had learned about university-based technology transfer over 15 years of licensing practice, and to describe ways … Continue reading

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