Bayh-Dole? [LWN.net]

Bayh-Dole?

Posted Jul 24, 2007 21:01 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
In reply to: Berkeley by corbet
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

What about Bayh-Dole, the "Turn Universities Into Patent Trolls Act"? After Bayh-Dole passed, US universities seem to have spent the 1980s ramping up their licensing departments.

Also, how many of the "amateur" and "unaffiliated" developers are really university-affiliated, but contributing under another email address? Some people do Free Software work that counts as a project for the university, but host it or contribute it in a way that's not easily traceable to the university.

(Log in to post comments)

Bayh-Dole?

Posted Jul 24, 2007 23:50 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I had considered mentioning Bayh-Dole, but a lot of university free software came out after it was passed, so its impact is sometimes exaggerated.

Bayh-Dole?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 1:24 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

But big institutions can sometimes react slowly to changes -- maybe universities needed time to tighten policies and staff up their licensing departments after Bayh-Dole was passed.

(If you're at a university, maybe you should find an existing project under a reciprocal license and contribute to that instead of starting your own.)

Bayh-Dole?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 1:07 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Well, I can say one thing on that, as someone who's signed UC intellectual property forms: the idea of code copyright the UC Regents being released under a free license today is... implausible. I'm sure it happens from time to time, but only if there are particular sympathetic PIs/managers involved. I suspect that some of this code is still making it into free software with a personal copyright attribution on it instead of the UC Regents copyright attribution, but at that point it disappears from an article like this's statistics.

A similar problem for these statistics is simply that there are more email providers these days. It used to be you took the university's email address and were grateful, but these days most of my classmates' emails are @gmail.com or the like. People hacking on a company's dollar are going to use their official company email address as per official or unofficial policy; students slacking off from studying don't have any comparable incentive; that could skew things.