<
https://theintercept.com/2021/08/29/bayh-dole-act-public-science-patents/>
"Beginning in the early 1970s, the enemies of government patent ownership
embraced a trendy new phrase in the nation’s political and economic lexicons:
“global competitiveness.” To compete against Europe and Asia, the argument
went, Washington had to incentivize innovation by relinquishing control of
inventions made under government contract and hand them over to the private
sector to handle them as they saw fit.
The argument was always a scrambled one. To start, it rested on the falsehood
that government inventions were being purposefully withheld from industry, when
public science was, by definition, readily available for licensing and use.
During the contentious hearings held on one of the failed bills that preceded
the Bayh-Dole Act, Michael Pertschuk, Federal Trade Commission chair under
President Jimmy Carter, testified that there was “no factual basis” for claims
that government ownership of patents was slowing or obstructing
commercialization. He told a room of red-faced Republican lawmakers, “The
available evidence shows just the opposite.”
The argument related to so-called global competition also dissolved under
scrutiny. “The most formidable new rival to U.S. technological leadership at
the time, Japan, maintained a much weaker patent system, and among other things
required wide licensing of patents,” F.M. Scherer, the FTC’s chief economist
between 1974 and 1976, told The Intercept. Meanwhile, the key technologies
behind the rising Silicon Valley-based high-tech industry of the era —
integrated circuits, computers, lasers, fiber optics — had been diffused not by
private monopolies but by a 1954 Justice Department consent decree that
crow-barred open Bell Labs’ vault of federally funded patents. According to the
best available evidence, it was the private sector that hoarded patents, slowed
development, and hurt national “competitiveness” — not the government.
But the anxiety of the ’70s was real, and the patent lobby held a keen
appreciation for its uses in overcoming deep political and public suspicions of
monopolies and the drug companies. The March 1973 issue of Newsweek introduced
Americans to a British term, “stagflation,” to describe the double whammy of
high inflation and unemployment. By 1975, the country was in the first
full-blown recession in recent memory. It was during this time, just before
Carter’s election, that a former patent lawyer-turned-assistant secretary of
commerce named Howard Forman came up with an idea to drive a stake through
Kennedy’s 1963 executive order. As neoconservatives outside government planned
their full-court press against the Soviet Union, old-line conservatives inside
government hatched a plan to destroy, at long last, the New Deal vision of
public science under public control."
Via Kevin O'Brien.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
