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Comment by aluminum96 | Hacker News Reader

Only somewhat on-topic, but this is the latest in a long line of cases which transfer IP from universities to corporations on various grounds.

For a particularly representative previous example, see Stanford v Roche [1], in which SCOTUS found that a patent originated with the individual researcher and not his institution, and was therefore transferrable to other private entities with whom the researcher had agreements.

I, for one, believe that we should enact stronger protections to ensure that research partially performed at publicly-funded labs remains in the hands of the public. In particular, I think that the Bayh–Dole Act should be strengthened to vest the patent with the institution directly, and to create a default presumption that the institution owns the IP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_M....

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I think you may be misunderstanding how the Bayh-Dole act works. The Stanford-Roche case looks like it hinged on a very particular set of circumstances involving a signle researcher working in both academia and industry, and the dispute was basically over who owned his work. The CRISPR case is different because the competing labs claim to have made the invention independently, with zero crossover. Even if Broad Institute were a for-profit corporation and not siphoning up vast amounts of NIH grants, the underlying dispute has nothing to do with Bayh-Dole or university IP policies, it's just a classic case of "who was first".

poster was arguing that things should work differently than they do. for some reason it is common when people argue for change for them to get lectures about how things are. weird stuff.

The poster was arguing that, when a university/corporate partnership invents something, the law should ensure the university doesn't get screwed.

The responder was pointing out, in this case, the law could be infinitely strong in allocating credit to the university but it wouldn't help because this case was about whether they invented the thing at all.

While the Broad institute is private, it is a non-profit that is tightly affiliated with MIT and Harvard. To me, this is different than a patent getting transferred to a multinational pharmaceutical corporate.

I didn't know they were a nonprofit. In that case, my OP is pretty off-topic for this case.

Non-profits can still have patent portfolios that they try to exploit for commercial gain -- though by licensing, rather than producing products directly. When the research was publicly funded, the same conflicts of interest apply.

The Broad also makes enormous bank as a sequencing service for pharma. They are "non profit" but they make a profit.

> I, for one, believe that we should enact stronger protections to ensure that research partially performed at publicly-funded labs remains in the hands of the public.

I agree!

> In particular, I think that the Bayh–Dole Act should be strengthened to vest the patent with the institution directly, and to create a default presumption that the institution owns the IP.

That is not the same thing though. The universities have historically been very exclusive about who can license their patent portfolios, and at high cost. They're the same as a business in that respect.

I once looked into licensing some software from an English university. At the very beginning of the discussion, I was read a long list of domains where the software had already been exclusively licensed. Great! We didn't fall into any of those domains, next question. It turned out I had misunderstood, the list was for domains where THEY thought the software should be each exclusively licensed to a third party.

There were other factors, but it became clear it wasn't worth the effort trying to license from the university.

> I, for one, believe that we should enact stronger protections to ensure that research partially performed at publicly-funded labs remains in the hands of the public.

OK...

> In particular, I think that the Bayh–Dole Act should be strengthened to vest the patent with the institution directly, and to create a default presumption that the institution owns the IP.

What happened to remaining in the hands of the public? How does the public benefit from this? With the patent assigned to Broad, nobody's allowed to use it without permission from Broad. With the patent assigned to the UC system, nobody's allowed to use it without permission from the UC regents. As far as the public is concerned, there's no difference.

Who are the "UC regents"? It is a public university, so (at least indirectly) the public. Seems like a big difference.

The regents are a corporation which was granted powers to operate on the behalf of the public.

The university of California is controlled by and owned by the people of California (at least in a round about way).

The PTO, and the very concept of a patent in the American legal system, are also controlled and owned by the people of California in that sense. It's not a useful way to look at the world.

I strongly disagree.

Universities already utilize government funding for research with potential business applications to the maximum extent with the minimum effort required to seek commercialization. Just ask any Director of Technology Transfer.

Because universities have no insight into what research has merit for business purposes, nor have they made any serious effort to discover it after decades of this funding, they farm graduate students into predatory policies designed to treat them like future lottery tickets (corporations).

Government-funded labs sit open while graduate students cannot conduct their research because of the total control administrations now exert - pretending to be VCs because these facilities are under their control.

There are millions of university patents produced yearly. Millions. Yet the commercialization rate is close to 0, even at the best.

The missing input is founders. The rarest ingredient in inventing businesses are founders. But universities treat them as deposable - including when they are from their own faculty.

The public requires no other return than the jobs (and payroll tax) they create - that was the justification for the bill.

This means that universities are committing fraud by preventing commercialization efforts - which they do by action, policy and neglect.

The ASU Foundation has made some strides in minting “founder friendly” commercialization policies, but we’re a long way off from anything to be proud of.

Seems ripe for "use it or lose it" patent policies. It's good when research is going towards useful things, but having all of those patents locked up is not serving anyone.

I agree that publicly funded research should be easier to get access to. Ironically, you have it backwards. Before the Bayh-Dole Act, there tended not to be any patent filings on publicly funded research at universities because it wasn't clear what claim the federal government had to the patents. Bayh-Dole, by clearly vesting patent rights in the universities, allowed the universities to take title to the patents and license or sell them to private corporations.

The usual story that gets told here is of fantastic success. Look at all the startups that have come out of university research. Look at all the licensing revenue universities have generated from patents that they own thanks to Bayh-Dole.

I'm actually a Bayh-Dole skeptic. Like you, I tend to believe that too much publicly funded research does get concentrated into certain private hands thanks to patent rights on federally funded research. But strengthening the Bayh-Dole Act would only encourage more concentration.

Some startups need exclusive rights to succeed, and pharmaceutical or biotech startups are the prime examples. But most startups don't need exclusive rights to succeed, and I don't see why we should trust university tech transfer offices to make good decisions about who should have access to federally funded technology and on what licensing terms when that is the case, as it is so often. A weaker Bayh-Dole Act would be more helpful than a stronger Bayh-Dole Act in that regard.

But even some biotech inventions like CRISPR-Cas9 or mRNA vaccine tech doesn't seem to me to be stuff that the federal government should allow to be controlled by university tech transfer offices. Some technologies are too important for that. That's why the Bayh-Dole Act includes a provision for "march-in rights." The surprising fact, however, is that they have never been used, even during the pandemic. That to me seems like the easiest and best place to push the federal government if you feel like too much tax payer funded research is being held hostage by tollbooth workers in university tech transfer offices.

I think HN has tried to be helpful by removing the trailing "." from the URL, but doing so has broken the Wikipedia link.

I've seen similar behavior elsewhere like in iMessage.

In many cases, leaving IP at Universities effectively means never employing it. For example, if there were stronger protections in place, I don't think the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine would ever have been widely available.

You clearly don't know what the Broad is.

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