Over the weekend, C4IP Co-Chairs and former USPTO Directors David Kappos and Andrei Iancu published an opinion piece in The Hill detailing how the Biden administration’s new proposal for march-in rights under the Bayh-Dole Act would decimate innovation across numerous crucial technology sectors.
The administration’s unprecedented proposal, announced in December, would allow government bureaucrats to “march in” and take over the patents on federally funded inventions if they decide that certain arbitrary criteria are met. As Kappos and Iancu explain, this would not only defy the plain text of the law, but it would also impede the law’s goal by deterring investors from helping bring promising technologies to market.
Moreover, while the White House has marketed the proposal as a blow to Big Pharma, Kappos and Iancu point out that it would have consequences for every technology area where federal funds are invested — including actively hindering progress on national priorities such as semiconductor innovation.
“The administration’s proposal is legally unsupportable and ill-conceived. Adopting it would destroy investors’ incentives to license federally-funded research—and will thus stifle American innovation.”
Read the full op-ed here: https://thehill.com/opinion/4407846-president-bidens-domestic-technology-seizure-plan/