Tag Archives: Bayh-Dole

Conspiracy against inventors’ rights and 18 USC 241/42 USC 1983

University administrators have been fond to claim that the Bayh-Dole Act gives their universities ownership of inventions made with federal support–or a right of first refusal, or a prohibition on assigning ownership to anyone other than the university. This was … Continue reading

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Subject Patent Exhaustion

Caltech has just sued Apple for infringement of a patent. The patent in question, “Serial concatenation of interleaved convolutional codes forming turbo-like codes” (US Patent No. 7,116,710) includes this statement of government interest: GOVERNMENT LICENSE RIGHTS The U.S. Government has … Continue reading

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NASA Turns Bayh-Dole Into a Vesting Statute

The US Supreme Court in Stanford v Roche ruled that Bayh-Dole was not a “vesting statute”–the law did not place ownership of patentable inventions made with federal support with the universities that hosted the research: Stanford contends that reading the … Continue reading

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The path from Bayh-Dole to inventors

Bayh-Dole is a law of federal contracting for inventions. Let’s work through it, again. 1) Bayh-Dole applies to federal agencies, not to universities. When university administrators say that “Bayh-Dole requires universities to commercialize inventions made with federal funding,” they are twice wrong. First, … Continue reading

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Banging Our Hearts Against the Wall

Now that an arguably effective national infrastructure for dealing with inventions made by university faculty has been systematically dismantled over three decades in favor of institutionally self-serving patent administration, it is difficult to see a road back to pre-Bayh-Dole management. … Continue reading

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Four Approaches to University Patent Policies

Policy For the last couple of weeks I have been considering the nature of university patent policies. I have looked at a number of university patent policies and written a number of drafts. Things get complicated quickly, but there appears … Continue reading

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Do what you have promised to do: Further consequences of (f)(2)

[Updated with a discussion of NIST’s May 2018 rule change] The (f)(2) requirement in the standard patent rights clause authorized by the Bayh-Dole Act is a requirement for the host university to delegate, to flow down, to subcontract a portion … Continue reading

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The First Principle of Bayh-Dole

Here is the First Principle of Bayh-Dole: A federal agency may not require the assignment to the federal government of an invention made with federal support at a nonprofit or small business if an inventor or the inventor’s assignee reports … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole Flow Down

Every so often I make an effort to show graphically how Bayh-Dole operates. The Bayh-Dole Act authorizes (arrow 1) the Department of Commerce to create regulations governing the disposition of patentable inventions made in the performance of work supported by … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole, the bureaucratic solution to massive federal funding of faculty research

Prior to 1912, university faculty generally did not seek patents. Cottrell at the University of California created Research Corporation to act as an external agent to present his and other faculty members’ inventions to industry. The Board of Research Corporation … Continue reading

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