[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.