Category Archives: Policy

The Compliance Apparatus is Essential to Bayh-Dole

The Bayh-Dole Act is often presented as a boon to universities. Yet a reading of the law as it makes its way into federal funding agreements suggests otherwise. Universities are a problem, and a lot of apparatus of Bayh-Dole is … Continue reading

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An Updated Guide to the Bayh-Dole Act

Ah, COGR has not contacted me yet for help in revising their long-neglected Guide to the Bayh-Dole Act. While I waited for their call, I put together this text for a brochure that might serve until they have finished revising, … Continue reading

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Problems with COGR’s 1999 "Guide" to Bayh-Dole

In 1999, the Council on Governmental Relations, a non-profit organization that fronts for over 100 research universities on lobbying and advocacy issues, produced an influential summary of the Bayh-Dole Act, “The Bayh-Dole Act:  A Guide to the Law and Implementing … Continue reading

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Compulsion, Fifth Amendment Taking, and SPRC (f)(2)

Given the apparent intention of certain advocates for Bayh-Dole that the purpose of the law should be that universities come to own faculty inventions made with federal support, thereby effectively cutting off Research Corporation and other independent invention management agents … Continue reading

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Three Responses to the SPRC post-Stanford v Roche

In the Bayh-Dole Act,  a “subject invention” is defined as any invention of the contractor conceived or first actually reduced to practice in the performance of work under a funding agreement… (35 USC 201(e)). A “contractor” is defined as any … Continue reading

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The Entrepreunial Research University

Three narratives have come together to support the transformation of American university innovation policy from one of diversity and institutional support to one of monopoly institutional control of research inventions, heralded as the best thing for the country. All the … Continue reading

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A vaccine for university invention borreliosis

Equity in an invention arises in a number of ways under the university patent policies of the pre-Bayh-Dole misconstruction.   Generally, the premise of equity has to do with support beyond the normal activities and salary of the work, unless someone … Continue reading

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Well Tempered IP Policy

In music one finds the concept of “temperament” in tuning. Jim Loy has a nice discussion of the physics. The basic problem is that the steps represented by the ratios of various notes, such as fifths (3/2), don’t exactly match … Continue reading

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Well, if you don’t like these five things, I’ve got others.

Innovation Daily has just published “Five Things Technology Transfer Offices Wish Their Start-ups Knew.” This appears to be based on a presentation the author made at the last AUTM meeting. Perhaps that’s why the piece argues that university IP offices … Continue reading

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Equity Policies and Ownership Policies, Part III

Part I is here.  Part II is here.  Part III follows below. The policies of the form of 1962–dealing in equities, diverse, open, advocating the use of external invention management agents, if a university had a policy at all–supported the … Continue reading

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