Comment by photochemsyn
4 hours ago
The article doesn't mention that Bayh-Dole made it legal for a university to exclusively license a patent generated by a government-financed researcher to a corporation.
Prior to this, if a corporation wanted to have exclusive rights to basic patents, they'd have to run their own private research labs to generate those patents. Prior to Bayh-Dole, university inventions were patented but there were no exclusive licensing deals. This means no competitive advantage; anyone can use license the patents (I believe any US citizen) before Bayh-Dole.
So corporations largely stopped funding private research labs like Bell and instead entered into public-private partnerships; on the academic side we saw the rise of the shady enterpreneurial researcher whose business plan was to use government funds to generate patents (not uncommonly based on fraudulent research) which formed the basis of a start-up which was sold to a major corporation.
The fix is simple: patents generated with taxpayer dollars at American universities should be available to any American citizen for a small licensing fee; if people want exclusive rights to patents, they need to put up the capital for the research institution themselves, as was the case with Bell Labs. Practically, this starts with a repeal of Bayh-Dole.
The obvious retort would be, if the situation were so favorable for corporations before Bayh-Dole, why were so few licensing deals in place before the passage of Bayh-Dole (fewer than 5% of technologies were licensed)?
This sounds like a much more reasonable explanation for the fall of the corporate labs.
> So corporations largely stopped funding private research labs like Bell and instead entered into public-private partnerships
They didn't though. Bayh-Dole was 1980. All the big tech firms have invested massively in R&D since then, and I think it's also true for many non-tech industries or tech-adjacent (e.g. chip manufacturing, oil and gas).
Most tech companies appear to put basically all their engineering/ product orgs down as R&D. That's probably not how most people understand the term.
Repealing Bayh-Dole is a terrible idea. A lot of research produces enough to get a patent but still requires a lot more development to get a product. Drugs are probably the best example.
Wouldn't a company still be able to patent the additional development they did to turn the original research into a product? E.g. delivery method patents are very common.
I don't see why they need to own the original research.
All else being equal, it's most straightforward to demonstrate infringement of a composition of matter claim (which tends to be the earliest for pharma) and so these are more valuable. Also, they tend to be the earliest to issue and possibly litigate over, which also increases value.
It's a lot less valuable.