Posts Tagged: "university patenting"

Gulbrandsen’s chief complaint with the U.S. system centers around the fact that it has become enormously easy to challenge issued patents once they have been granted. In fact, organizations in pursuit of acquired technology are leveraging the kill-rate at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), to negotiate lower licensing payments. Threats are made that patents will be challenged in Inter Partes review, “so that you amend the license and reduce the fees,” Gulbrandsen explained. “So, immediately you know that devalues the patent and devalues the license agreement that you’ve got.”

This patenting step is absolutely crucial for the commercialization of inventions. In the absence of a strong intellectual property system – specifically patents – most of those inventions will never see the light of day. Why is that? The answer is quite simple – the cost to develop those inventions to a marketable product are significant and in the absence of intellectual property protections that the patent system provides, no one will ever invest in the promise of an invention. Said another way, how many of you would invest in a company that will spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on a product knowing that a competitor will be free to offer the same product at a fraction of the cost since they invested substantially less in R&D?

Universities are dependent upon the U.S. patent system and the capacity of that system to protect the legitimate intellectual property rights of individual university inventors and large companies alike. This system drives U.S. innovation and our economic competitiveness in the world. Patents provide universities with the means to ensure that many discoveries resulting from research are transferred to the private sector where those discoveries can be turned into innovative products and processes that power our economy, create jobs, and improve quality of life.

Fortunately, a new study showing that academic patent licensing contributed more than $1 trillion to the U.S. economy over eighteen years blows the stuffing right out of that straw man. We can only hope Congress gets the message before it turns the patent system into a weapon to squash inventors.

Research and development of cancer treatments seemed to be a particularly strong focus area for Morehouse School of Medicine. A pharmaceutical composition designed to modulate receptors within a cancer patient which play an important role in the progression of cancers is disclosed and protected by U.S. Patent No. 8796422, which is titled Chemokine-Immunoglobulin Fusion Polypeptides, Compositions, Method of Making and Use Thereof.

They found that citations were elevated for licensed patents. Moreover, most citations occurred after the patent was licensed. That licensing of patented technology increases its diffusion and relevance more broadly is supported by Drivas et al. (2014), who found that citations by non–licensees to patents exclusively licensed (either by geographic area or field of use) by the University of California increased after the licenses were executed. These are objective empirical indicia – not subjective responses of accused infringers to selective surveys.

How tragic if the United States of America turns its patent system into a tool that rich and powerful companies use to suppress innovation that challenges their comfortable status quo. But Just because there are sharks doesn’t mean you stay out of the ocean. We need to get ahead of the curve and aggressively publicize what we’re doing to protect the public interest. That means showing how Bayh-Dole and the patent system advance human well-being and wealth creation not just here but around the world.

The innovations spurred by Stanford R&D often go on to create economic success once those developments leave the school’s research facilities. By the university’s own measure, companies started by entrepreneurs from the school have created 5.4 million jobs since the 1930s and they currently generate $2.7 trillion in global revenue each year. Many of Stanford 2014 Text Clusterus use products from these companies daily and a number of these businesses, including Yahoo!, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco, are regularly featured as part of our Companies We Follow series here on IPWatchdog.

There are a variety of problems with this paper, the conclusions reached and the methodology. Perhaps the largest problem is that Professors Feldman and Lemley rely on subjective evidence rather than volumes of objective evidence that contradict the self-serving responses from those who are licensing rights they are already infringing. What else would you suspect from a homogenous subset of individuals who collectively don’t like the patent system very much? Collective bias seems a far more likely answer as to why there is “near unanimity,” as the Professors claim. Even so, how is it possible that any group could ever achieve near unanimity about anything? The fact that there was near unanimity demands one to question whether there is a bias or flaw in the survey, yet no such inquiry seems to have been made.

For the past 90 years WARF has promoted scientific research and innovation at UW-Madison and has earned more than $800 million in patent royalty revenues over the years and has generated $1.25 billion in revenue for the institution. WARF’s success spans well beyond the critical role Bremer played in the enactment of Bayh-Dole, and can be seen in how the University of Wisconsin-Madison stacks up against research universities from across the world. In 2013, UW-Madison placed 6th globally among all universities receiving U.S. patents that year with 160 patents; prostate cancer vaccines, clean compression engines and prosthetic device control were among the technologies protected.

A few of the patents that have been issued to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in recent weeks protect inventions developed to address major public health and environmental safety concerns. A novel technique for remediating oil spills in open waterways is disclosed and protected by U.S. Patent No. 8945393, which is titled Magnetic Colloid Petroleum Oil Spill Clean-Up of Ocean Surface, Depth, and Shore Regions. The patent claims a method of removing oil from water by mixing a magnetizable material with water to form a magnetorheological fluid and magnetically attracting that water to separate the oil and water phases. This innovation allows for the magnetization of oil to remove oil from water sources and transfer the oil to storage while releasing water back into the ocean.

While there has been much written in the past months on efforts to change the U.S. patent system, there has been little focus on the vital role that the current patent system plays in supporting universities in conducting basic research and development (R&D). This university-driven R&D is a critical force in driving innovation, inventions and often startups that create jobs and promote American competitiveness.

Merry Lynn Morris, a faculty member USF, affected by a tragedy that left her father wheel chair bound for 21 years, created an Omni-Directional, Hands-Free Rolling Dance Chair to give those in wheel chairs new freedom and independence that most wheel chairs do not allow.

The University of California maintains a portfolio of 11,556 active patent grants. Patented technologies which are currently available for licensing through UC include laser scanners for eye tracking, cardiovascular disorder treatments and environmentally friendly water treatment techniques. In 2013, the Regents of the University of California were issued 399 patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, tied for 89th-most. A great percentage of UC’s 2014 inventions were related to providing methods involving nucleic acids, host cells and pharmaceutical compositions.