Posts Tagged: "university patenting"

State Department, Universities Blast UN Attack on Patents

If the UN Secretary General and the members of his “High Level Panel on Access to Medicines” thought the State Department was bluffing when it warned against their attempt to make intellectual property the fall guy for the lack of health care in poor countries, they were rudely awakened Friday afternoon. Disdaining diplomatic niceties, less than two days after the UN report issued, State bluntly replied in a statement titled “U.S. Disappointed Over Fundamentally Flawed Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines.” Compounding the pain, the same day five prominent university associations issued a joint paper taking the report apart. Being directly and publicly rebuked in this manner is a new experience for the Secretary General and his minions– but one they richly deserve.

Research Universities Face Licensing Limitations Sought by Electronic Frontier Foundation

Another incursion into research university governance and operations is now underway. And this time all research universities are affected. Led by the DC Based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leftist anti-patent activist coalition that has initiated a 50-state legislative campaign to shrink research university patent licensing rights at the state level. (See) The measure’s purported objective is to prevent publicly funded university research patents from being licensed to so-called “Patent Assertion Entities” (PAEs, also known by the pejorative term “patent trolls”). The draft legislation is imprecise, making it even more dangerous than first appears.

Property Rights Key to Bayh-Dole Act’s Success

The focus of the political advocates pushing march-in may be lower drug costs. But the long-term costs of ripping apart IP rights are far higher and more fundamental than advocates acknowledge. The long-term price of exercising these exceptional prerogatives could include creating a crisis in confidence over use of federally funded research discoveries, dried-up private investments where basic research has federally funded fingerprints, hesitation to commercialize university research, and a corresponding drop in start-ups, new products, economic development and technological advancements. March-in could effectively repeal Bayh-Dole.

Common Afflictions of University Patent Portfolios

There are a few things that we notice when we look at the patent portfolios originated from the universities. There is no rule that applies to every single university but there are definitely trends that one can spot quickly. For example, universities tend not to file many continuation applications, and instead let patent applications issue out. When the only patent application in the family issues, the prosecution is closed, and there is no ability to file continuation applications. We also don’t see enough attention to portfolio pruning as a way of containing cost. Universities engage in very early stage research, which is speculative by its nature, and therefore many patent applications are filed on technologies that do not turn out to have significant economic value later on. This is a very good recipe for accumulating patents with little or no value.

NIH Pressured to Misuse Bayh-Dole to Control Drug Prices

Secretary Burwell and Director Collins are facing formidable pressure to reinterpret the Bayh-Dole Act for the compulsory licensing of costly drugs arising from federally supported research. And the pressure just increased another notch. On March 28, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar joined the leaders of the House Democratic Task Force on Prescription Drug Pricing urging Burwell and Collins to hold a meeting “to allow the public to engage in a dialogue with the Department of Health and Human Services and NIH in order to better understand its position on the use of march-in rights to address excessive prices.” If NIH joins in pursuing the swamp gas illusion that Bayh-Dole was intended to regulate drug pricing, we’ll quickly learn that it’s a lot easier getting into this morass than getting back out.