Bayh–Dole Act

The Bayh–Dole Act or Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act (Pub. L. 96-517, December 12, 1980) is United States legislation dealing with intellectual property arising from federal government-funded research. Sponsored by two senators, Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas, the Act was adopted in 1980, is codified at 94 Stat. 3015, and in 35 U.S.C. § 200–212, and is implemented by 37 C.F.R. 401.no connection exists between the Bayh-Dole Act and the legal standards that courts employ to assess patentability. Furthermore, none of the eight policy objectives of the Bayh-Dole Act encourages or condones less stringent application of the patent laws to universities than to other entities. The Bayh–Dole Act or Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act (Pub. L. 96-517, December 12, 1980) is United States legislation dealing with intellectual property arising from federal government-funded research. Sponsored by two senators, Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas, the Act was adopted in 1980, is codified at 94 Stat. 3015, and in 35 U.S.C. § 200–212, and is implemented by 37 C.F.R. 401. The key change made by Bayh–Dole was in ownership of inventions made with federal funding. Before the Bayh–Dole Act, federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors (wherever they worked) to assign inventions they made using federal funding to the federal government. Bayh–Dole permits a university, small business, or non-profit institution to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government. The Bayh–Dole Act grew out of the Congress's efforts to respond to the economic malaise of the 1970s. One of Congress's efforts was focused on how best to manage inventions that were created with the more than $75 billion a year invested in government sponsored R&D. Three philosophies were debated: 'a Hamiltonian belief that the solution lay with a strong central government, which should take charge and actively manage these resources'; 'a Jeffersonian belief that the solution lay with the individual and that the best thing government could do to provide incentives for success was to get out of the way of these individuals'; and a belief that 'held that government could only hurt and that it should make sure that everyone benefited financially from government's efforts'. Prior to the enactment of Bayh-Dole, the U.S. government had accumulated 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5% of those patents were commercially licensed.:3 These patents had accumulated because after World War II, the government under President Harry S. Truman decided to continue and even ramp up its spending on research and development, on the basis of Vannevar Bush's famous report entitled, 'Science The Endless Frontier', which stated: 'Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.' However, the government did not have a unified patent policy governing all the agencies that funded research, and the general policy was that government would retain title to inventions and would license them only nonexclusively.:10–14 'Those seeking to use government-owned technology found a maze of rules and regulations set out by the agencies in question because there was no uniform federal policy on patents for government-sponsored inventions or on the transfer of technology from the government to the private sector.' In 1968 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) introduced a uniform 'Institutional Patent Agreement' to allow grantee nonprofit institutions to obtain assignment of patentable inventions made with federal funding for which the institution had decided to seek patents. By 1980, over seventy universities and research organizations had negotiated an IPA with HEW or with the National Science Foundation. In the 1970s, faculty at Purdue University in Indiana had made important discoveries under grants from the Department of Energy, which did not issue Institutional Patent Agreements. Officials at the university complained to their Senator, Birch Bayh, whose staff investigated. At the same time, Senator Robert Dole was made aware of similar issues, and the two senators agreed to collaborate on a bill, along the lines of the 'Jeffersonian belief' described above.