Posts Tagged: "university technology"

Being abroad where Bayh-Dole is recognized as the gold standard in technology transfer made the article more jarring. Like whack a mole, the refuted claims of the critics pop up to create the impression the public is being cheated. That may attract attention but it unfairly disparages a system producing tremendous public benefits. It’s ironic that a Boston based publication doesn’t know what to make of Bayh-Dole. Few cities have benefitted more from its passage. Boston is attracting companies from around the world because the law cleared the way for partnerships with its universities and research hospitals. Rather than a trip to Kazakhstan, perhaps a tour of their own town would be beneficial.

Only someone who is completely indifferent to the truth, and who has intentionally put on blinders so they don’t see the truth, could ever say that the public does not benefit from federally funded research. It is sad that this even needs to be pointed out, but critics of the patent system and federal research funding can take intellectual dishonesty to bizarre heights. In other words, they are not beyond making outright false statements, which all too frequently go unchecked. Equally ridiculous is the argument that the federal government built every technology that is the result of some funded scientific breakthrough. The fact that the government invested in basic science doesn’t mean that all follow-on innovation that utilizes the discoveries was built and paid for by the government. Such an argument is completely disingenuous.

Unfortunately, we are going through another period where many see the triumvirate of big government, big business and big labor guiding an economy stuck at a 2% growth rate as preferable to the messy “creative destruction” of free enterprise capitalism. The emphasis on making sure the existing economic pie is fairly distributed rather than grown leads to increased hostility to the intellectual property system. We see arguments that patents harm rather than stimulate innovation and hear how much better it would be if they were placed in the public domain or licensed non-exclusively to be more fair. Many have forgotten that our prosperity is the result of inventions that in just a few decades created a standard of living previously unimaginable.

Like a lemming running off a cliff, Fortune author Jeff John Roberts ignores easily verifiable historical truths in what can really only be described as a hit piece on the patent system and patents in general. The lack of intellectual integrity, or even intellectual curiosity, is astonishing… It is absolutely necessary to quash any suggestion that here is a “short supply” of medical miracles today. Medical research is still turning up incredible findings. A quick scan of health news shows plenty of academic innovation leading to tomorrow’s medical miracles. That the author could make such an utterly absurd statement has to call into question the broader motivations. Of course, authors do unfortunately sometimes exaggerate, misrepresent and even lie. What is truly astonishing is how the Editors of Fortune allowed such a falsehood to be published. Do they do no fact checking at all at Fortune?

As the new academic year starts in earnest we can be sure that the all too familiar attacks on the patent system will reemerge, as they always seem to do. Patent critics, who are not averse to making provably false claims, seem to believe that if they repeatedly say something that is false enough times it will miraculously become true. Hard to pin down, patent critics will deflect reality with thought experiments based in fiction and fantasy. They demand what we know to be true is actually false, as if we are in some parallel, bizzaro universe where up is down and white is black.

While Chinese President Xi is cracking down on political dissidents and solidifying his power over the army, the country has begun a huge push for innovation. While it’s easy for us to look askance at that proposition, we may be about to launch an equally quixotic experiment of our own: seeing if American innovation can survive the undermining of our patent system.

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.