Category Archives: Policy

Seven Pillars of Bayh-Dole, the Law that Loots the Commons

I’ve spent more than a few months now focused on Bayh-Dole and its history. It’s worth taking a moment and summarizing some findings. Perhaps this could be the start of a new guide to the Bayh-Dole Act, told from the … Continue reading

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Going to Eleven on NIST and (f)(2)

NIST is drafting new rules for the standard patent rights clause authorized by Bayh-Dole. Included in the proposed new provisions is a requirement that contractors require the assignment of inventions to the contractor. This is a bad idea. Besides, it’s … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole’s restrictions on Pigpen use of licensing income, V

Exclusive licensing creates its own complexities, just like the Peanuts character Pigpen brings his own dust storm with him wherever he goes. If inventions are “dedicated” to the public or are licensed non-discriminatorily on standard terms, there’s not so much … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole’s restrictions on Pigpen use of licensing income, IV

We may posit that for any “concept” that we can pull out of the air, there’s an implied “cost” to make that concept into a “commercial product.” We could imagine a walking cat-bus, say. We could work out the robotics, … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole’s restrictions on Pigpen use of licensing income, II

We should pause here. Sugarman and Mencino’s argument rests on the idea that a certain method of patent management leads to a finding that licensing income is related to a university’s exempt purposes: use with greatest possible public benefit widest … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole’s transfer of public policy judgment, 2

Early on, federal research support was debated in terms of a dichotomy between procurement and subvention. As a procurement agent, the government purchased research services and the things that those services created. The government paid contractors to do work and … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole’s transfer of public policy judgment

On July 18, 1978, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin sent a letter to the director of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy recommending an indefinite stay in extending government-wide the Institutional Patent Agreement program. In the letter, Senator Nelson makes … Continue reading

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Parsing Federal Security Agency Order 110-1 (1952)

There once was an active debate around whether the federal government should support research just to support research. Vannevar Bush’s Science the Endless Frontier formed part of this debate, and did a great deal to seal the case for government … Continue reading

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The Unofficial University of Wisconsin Patent Policy, c. 1960

In his 1962 compendium of university patent policies, Archie Palmer noted that the University of Wisconsin had no formal patent policy. By then, Wisconsin was an outlier among research universities, most of which had some statement regarding patents and inventions. … Continue reading

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Getting at the truth about Bayh-Dole’s impact, Part 5

Now we get to the crunch of Catherine Kirby’s blog article–published at a Rice University web site for entrepreneurship–with the section “Did the Bill Work?” Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, more than 5,000 new companies have formed from federally … Continue reading

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