Re: "junior" authorship

Dan L. Burk <burkdanl[_at_]shu.edu> wrote:
>
> On 7/31/98, Diane Cabell <cabell[_at_]mama-tech.com> wrote:
> >
> > The tradition evolved this way because US universities (the
> > traditional source of scientific research) are under an obligation
> > to make public their results, so they did not traditionally protect
> > their ideas via patent or trade secret. Nevertheless, it is the
> > ideas and the technical competence of the research that are valued
> > by academics, not the expression of it.
>
> I agree with much of Diane's reply, but am uncertain about her
> assertion that universities "traditionally" did not protect research
> via patent. There is a fairly long tradition of robust university
> patenting in the chemical arts, with which I am most familiar, and I
> am given to understand that this was traditionally even more common for
> the electrical arts. She may be thinking primarily about biomedical
> research, which has become a focus of university patenting over the
> last 20 years.

You're right, Dan, that there have been singular instances of university patent activity for quite a long time, but my response was looking at the larger experience in 20th century American academia. I toiled in MIT's Patent, Copyright and Licensing Office in days of yore and get my perspective from reading ancient oversight committee reports.

Some universities did patent faculty/staff inventions early on (WHARF, MIT) and much of that arose out of the electrical and physical fields as you rightly point out. But most of them didn't get into the business until the 80's when the Bayh-Dole Act (35 USC 200 et seq.) was passed. Before that the government (which paid for most of the research in all fields) retained patent rights to inventions under their contracts. A handful of universities had negotiated IPAs (Institutional Patent Agreements) with the USG which gave them the right to own and license the technology. Bayh-Dole opened up the market for all universities by giving equivalent rights to all.

Before that, few schools even had patent policies, much less active patent licensing programs or funds to operate them. Individual faculty "consulted" the technology away privately. Many still do.

Of course, there have always been different arrangements for industrial research sponsors (who ordinarily *did* demand that patents be obtained), but even today that accounts for less than 20%(fact check required!) of research and it was far lower before the bio-tech boom of the 80's..

Diane Cabell, Esq.
http://www.mama-tech.com/

Fausett, Gaeta & Lund LLP
21 School Street, 3rd Floor
Boston, MA 02108 US
1.617.227.1600
http://www.fausett.com/ Received on Tue Aug 04 1998 - 11:38:50 GMT