The question of protecting intellectual property rights by academic inventors was never seriously contemplated until the introduction of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 in the US. The Act allowed universities to retain patent rights over inventions arising out of federally-funded research and to...

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the...

In this chapter, we explore the extent to which universities and other nonprofit research institutes currently participate in the secondary market for patents. We document 220 assignments, involving a total of 544 U.S. patent assets, that appear to represent arms-length patent sales by...

What happens when a contract, the Patent Act, and the Bayh-Dole Act purport to give ownership in the same patent to the government, a university, and a university researcher, all at the same time? The US Supreme Court recently answered this question in Stanford Univ. v Roche Molecular Sys.,...

On October 11, 2011, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, issued an opinion affirming a decision of the US International Trade Commission (ITC) barring importation of a product made in China by a Chinese company using trade secrets...

Federal funding for biomedical research at U.S. universities increases universities’ research funding from non-federal sources. Most previous research on the relationship between research and development (R&D) expenditures and patenting has considered aggregate R&D expenditures or funding...

This paper describes an empirical study of the differences in industry interaction of US tenure and tenure-track academics that are funded by civilian and military funding agencies. Significant differences in industry interaction as manifested in a range of different interaction types can be...