Patents & Legal Expenditures

Universities are engines of innovation. To encourage further innovation, the federal government and charitable foundations give universities grants in order to enable university researchers to produce the inventions and discoveries that will continue to fuel our knowledge economy. Among other things, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was supposed to encourage additional innovation by enabling universities to patent inventions and discoveries produced using federal funds and to license those patents to private companies, rather than turning their patent rights over to the government. The Bayh-Dole Act unquestionably encouraged universities to patent inventions and license their patents. Since the passage of the Act, all major research universities have increased their presence in the patent sector and created technology transfer offices to manage their patent portfolios. While the Bayh-Dole Act can be viewed as successful in this regard, the Act and other patent policy changes since 1980 may have also created perverse incentives to which universities have responded