Patently Crazy
- PDF / 131,812 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 576 x 783 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 136 Views
Patently Crazy David J. Eaglesham Twenty years ago, the Bayh–Dole Act mandated that U.S. universities could commercialize patents based on governmentfunded research and development (R&D). Although the law has been highly successful for the creation of start-up companies, and is being widely copied in Europe and elsewhere, it has produced enormous barriers to partnerships between industry and academia. I argue that universities need to focus on their core mission of knowledge creation and dissemination and we need to adopt patent rules where a failure to commercialize will create march-in rights for anyone to use. Last year, the university community in the United States made well over a billion dollars in licensing revenue.1 The top 10 universities are pulling in 60% of the income, while universities outside the top 50 barely cover their legal costs. Only 10% of university patents are ever licensed, and only 1% of these licenses generate more than $1 million but these top-0.1% generate 80% of revenue. The blockbuster winners include some examples where new products and companies are formed directly from the university activity. However, they increasingly include large settlements of lawsuits filed by universities against companies that already had products on the market. Thus, the line between universities and “patent trolls”* has become blurred. Worse, universities have begun to obtain licensing revenue explicitly through licensing portions of their portfolio to third-party trolls. If the research enterprise can be compared to the mapping of an unexplored land, then patents constitute the tollplazas. The rationale for patents, roughly, is that if you build the road in virgin territory you get to put up a toll plaza. This leaves the unlicensed 90% of university patents in a rather odd position. Universities are not-for-profit entities and they do not commercialize anything. So all of these unlicensed patents are toll plazas set up in the middle of an uninhabited valley in the hope that maybe one day *“…patent owner…that enforces patent rights against accused infringers, but does not manufacture products or supply services based on the patents in question,” Wikipedia, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll (accessed April 2007).
someone will put a road there. These unexploded landmines constitute obstacles, as opposed to enablers, for someone coming along later and trying to develop a new product or technology. In the absence of a successful product, the innovator must explore possible pathways to make a product. Whole areas of potential exploration are blocked by universitycontrolled patents. The universities’ new role as IP†-competitors to industrial partners has enormously soured relations with industry. In university–industry collaborations, the largest issue by far is establishing intellectual-property terms. Industrial partners often say that dealing with universities is worse than dealing with a direct competitor. Universities in the United States are involved in patenting by Act of Congress. The 1980 Bay
Data Loading...
