Maryland Legislator Wants To Keep State University Patents Away From Trolls (eff.org)

The EFF's "Reclaim Invention" campaign provided the template for a patent troll-fighting bill recently introduced in the Maryland legislature to guide public universities. An anonymous reader writes: The bill would "void any agreement by the university to license or transfer a patent to a patent assertion entity (or patent troll)," according to the EFF, requiring universities to manage their patent portfolios in the public interest. James Love, the director of the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International, argues this would prevent assigning patents to "organizations who are just suing people for infringement," which is especially important for publicly-funded colleges. "You don't want public sector patents to be used in a way that's a weapon against the public." Yarden Katz, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet amd Society, says the Maryland legislation would "set an example for other states by adopting a framework for academic research that puts public interests front and center."
The EFF has created a web page where you can encourage your own legislators to pass similar bills, and to urge universities to pledge "not to knowingly license or sell the rights of inventions, research, or innovation...to patent assertion entities, or patent trolls."

Comments

Violating contracts is a dangerous idea

[reemul]

I strongly oppose patent trolls, but retroactively breaking valid contracts and nullifying sales of patents because you don't like who the patent was sold to is a truly horrible idea. If you don't want patent trolls to have university patents, don't sell them to them. And fire everyone at the university involved if they do sell them. Letting the university enter into a contract and then back out with no consequence because the purchaser is engaged in a vile but legal practice does damage to our legal system that far outweighs any possible benefit. This is just a bad idea generally. The EFF should spend their time trying to get patent trolling itself banned, not damaging the sanctity of contracts generally with cheap stunts because they like some of the short term outcomes.

Re:Marlyand is too little

[slew]

It sets a legal precedent.

Under the law, you can sell your patent to whomever you want. This proposed legislation in Maryland just prevents their state universities (which are effectively controlled/directed by a board chartered by the state) from directly selling University patents to trolls. It doesn't set legal precedence, it just directs the policy of an entity that is nominally under state government control.

This law doesn't (and can't) prevent non-state universities in Maryland from doing so, or anyone else in the state for that matter. It even can't prevent the company that the University sold the patent to from later selling them to a patent troll (it only requires that the University research past practices of the entity that it licenses to, but as we know past performance doesn't guarantee future results).

In fact, depending on how some universities' independent licencing entities are legally structured, they might practically be considered patent trolls themselves (i.e., patent assertion entities whose primary business model is to assert patents or obtain licensing fees). Depending on how this law is interpreted, it might prevent the cross assignment of a patent originally created by a joint partnership industry/research group of the university from transferring the patent to the university's own licencing arm, leaving the industrial partner the only entity in Maryland legally capable of licensing a patent from a joint partnership to others (and I suspect an industrial partner probably wouldn't be financially motivated to license to competitors). Now that would some accidental unintended consequence of this bill wouldn't it?