Courses/CS 461/Museum of unintended consequences/Universities allowed to hold the patents on federally funded research

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According to an article in The New York Times,

four leading technology companies and seven American universities have agreed on principles for making software developed in collaborative projects freely available.

The legal wrangling over intellectual property rights in research projects involving universities and companies, specialists say, can take months, sometimes more than a year. This legal maneuvering, they say, is not only slowing the pace of innovation, but is also prompting some companies to seek university research partners in other countries, where negotiations over intellectual property are less time-consuming. …

The current problem, said Lesa Mitchell, a vice president at the [Ewing Marion] Kauffman Foundation, was partly an "unintended consequence" of policies meant to encourage universities to make their research available for commercial uses, thus stimulating innovation and economic growth.

The tone was set, Ms. Mitchell said, by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed universities to hold the patents on federally funded research and to license that intellectual property to industry.

Since then, universities, like many corporations, have sought to cash in wherever possible on their intellectual property. …

The guidelines and framework for the agreement will [be] posted this week at http://www.ibm.com/university, and at the Kauffman foundation's site, http://www.kauffman.org.

This is a story of a sequence of unintended consequences.

1. The Bayh-Dole Act changed university expectations about the possibility of profiting from research performed on their campuses.
2. This led to more difficult negotiatons between Universities and corporations and to increasing amount of research being funded overseas by US corporations.
3. This led the Universities and the corporations to worry about research in this country and the long-term consequences of decreased US research.
4. This lead to this agreement under which the result of much research will apparently be made available for free to the general public.

Russ Abbott 13:01, 20 December 2005 (PST)