| Dear 144 Universities, I believe I am not alone in holding the opinion that public funds should not result in private gains. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 screwed the taxpaying public for your benefit. The public is not wrong to ask that it be reversed or corrected. If you wish to enjoy the benefits of private research, stop asking for the grant of public research funding. If you wish to enjoy the benefits of public research funding, stop asking for the grant of a limited monopoly. University administration is already treading upon thin ice by employing ever-increasing numbers of underpaid temporary and part-time employees to undertake one of the essential and indispensable functions of a university: teaching. At the same time, tuition charged to students has risen much higher than the rate of inflation, and student loan debt burdens have skyrocketed. Thus, I have no sympathy for you. The remedy already available to you for an increased cost in defense of patents is to produce fewer, more defensible patents. The truth of the Bayh-Dole legacy is that it has allowed the profit motive to corrupt science to an even greater extent than the "publish or perish" culture and the bias against negative results. You are no longer doing research for the sake of the advancement of knowledge, but research for the advancement of the university's revenues, and those motives produce vastly different results in practice. Furthermore, you are not rare and privileged centers of innovation. Advancement in technology has removed certain areas of research from the sole demesne of universities and national research laboratories to private corporations, or even to crowd-funded campaigns for a single individual. Doppler radar: invented before Bayh-Dole. Web browsers: Berners-Lee testified at the Eolas trial that he did not attempt to patent the web. Further evidence showed that Berners-Lee had previously described the U.S. patent system as "incentive for obfuscation" and that the threshold for patentability is set "ridiculously low." Yes, bringing that up as an example of university innovation was a great idea. Berners-Lee never tried to squeeze a dime out of his web browser, and the entire world has benefited from that generosity and foresight in far greater measure than he ever could have hoped to keep for himself. The Internet: invented before Bayh-Dole. Unpatented. CT scans: invented in 1971, before Bayh-Dole, in the UK. MRI: invented in 1971, before Bayh-Dole. SUNY chose not to patent it. FluMist (LAIV): I'm not entirely certain why vaccination is held out as an example of why university innovation should be patent protected, as Edward Jenner became a physician through apprenticeship, and the Royal Society did not even publish his initial reports. FluMist does not seem all that remarkable an innovation in light of the facts that other influenza vaccines exist, and the side effects of FluMist are more severe than for injected vaccines. GPS: This one was unequivocally driven by the U.S. DoD, and the first satellite launched before Bayh-Dole. The invention of more accurate timepieces have always, throughout the whole of history, been driven by navies, for whom that technology is the Holy Grail of navigation. Barcodes: This was invented by Woodland and Silver, based upon Morse code and motion picture soundtracks. Neither were employed by a university at the time. Their 1952 invention preceded Bayh-Dole. Could those universities not come up with examples of how PATENTED and DEFENDED innovations changed the world? Perhaps they might have also done us the honor of fact-checking their own claims to establish that their examples were also attributable to a university? |
How the heck could that ever work? When a commercial vehicle uses a public road, public funds are resulting in private gains. When a city transit system buys a bus from a for-profit bus maker, public funds result in private gains.
Most of what public funds are spent on results in private gain.
Did you phrase things more expansively than you meant?