[photochemsyn]

Intellectual property generated at universities that accept any taxpayer funding whatsoever should belong to the taxpayer, meaning any US citizen should automatically have access to that IP under a free non-exclusive license.

If you don't like this, tell the billionaires to go back to funding private research centers (e.g. Bell Labs) and they can own all the IP generated there outright.

Otherwise, it's just a ripoff of the taxpayer by state-subsidized 'entrepreneurs' which makes a mockery of the whole free-market capitalist competition system they claim to support. Ultimately, we end up with a system of aristocrats gambling at casinos who are given government bailouts every time they make a stupid bet - which is not sustainable over the long run.

[vineyardmike]

> Intellectual property generated at universities that accept any taxpayer funding whatsoever should belong to the taxpayer

Not everything generated at a university that takes tax money is government owned, but everything the government funds is available to the government.

> private research centers (e.g. Bell Labs)

Companies like Google or Apple have been funding tons of research. I worked for a government research lab doing medical research. The research being done for the Apple Watch was miles better than ours, because it had way more funding.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act

[ioblomov]

Bell Labs, with all its ground-breaking, Nobel-winning research—from the transistor to UNIX and the cosmic microwave background to information theory—is an extreme outlier because, outside of rich governments themselves, only the unlimited resources of a government-sanctioned monopoly could fund basic research that, at the time, would have no obvious utility. Though the fruits were smaller in scale, Xerox PARC is another rare example.