Category Archives: Bayh-Dole
A serious flaw in a paper about a serious flaw in Bayh-Dole that isn’t a flaw
A recent paper argues that there’s a hole in Bayh-Dole’s treatment of assignments. I thought that for a while, but then I went and read the law and the implementing regulations and realized that there was no hole. In Stanford … Continue reading
The Retrenchment Movement
The Stanford v. Roche case was about how universities get ownership of inventions under Bayh-Dole. Stanford argued vesting. The Solicitor General argued voiding all other alternatives. WARF argued faculty were gullible, inept, and selfish. AUTM threw sticks and dirt in … Continue reading
It’s a dead parrot, guys
Joe Allen, whom I respect a great deal for his work on Bayh-Dole, won’t give up after the ruling on Stanford v Roche. He has published a piece that aims to undermine the arguments I made in a commentary published … Continue reading
Getting it clear on the Stanford v Roche decision
While the history of the work to create the Bayh-Dole Act is always fascinating, the intentions and later reasoning about the law by advocates for legislation does not necessarily translate into the intention of Congress, nor to the actual language … Continue reading
The loss of university invention selectivity
A primary argument for university involvement in the management of federally supported inventions was that university agents were reporting something like 30% of their inventions under management were being placed with commercialization partners, while the federal agencies’ rate was something … Continue reading
The Root of the Problem
In the current Businessweek there’s a short interview by Tom Keen with John Taft about the idea of stewardship in the banking industry. The parallels with university IP are striking: [T]he leaders of our financial institutions lost touch with their … Continue reading
IP policy architectures, simpler than possible
One of the challenges of dealing with university technology transfer is that many of the descriptions of what is to be accomplished are cast in the singular, without context. Policies are then built around these singularities, and anything multiple is … Continue reading
Mapping Invention Portfolio Expectations
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
Patent battles and research fragmentation
John Dvorak over at PC Magazine has an interesting comment on the patent battles shaping up in mobile. His more general observation, however, is what caught my eye: This whole idea of actual inventions and the monopoly is over. Around … Continue reading
Projects, the Treatment for Fool’s Dream Virus
The gulf between the Supreme Court decision in Stanford v Roche and the push in universities for present assignments is huge. The Court decided the question whether Bayh-Dole was a vesting statute. It said no. Wasn’t. By doing that, … Continue reading