Patenting public-funded research for technology transfer
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 license those patents exclusively or nonexclusively at their discretion. This particular legislation was a response to the growing concern over the fact that federally funded inventions in the US were not reaching the market place. This paper present a critical review of the US experience after the Bayh-Dole Act and argue that the evidence is far from being unambiguous. It discuss the debate surrounding the Act