Not satiated by siphoning revenue from Nvidia's and Advanced Micro Devices' chip exports and owning 10 percent of Intel, the federal government is now looking to get a cut of the royalties generated by university patents. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick proclaimed, "We are going to make a deal with them all" during a Tuesday Cabinet meeting.
"We have given tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars to universities for them to do research," Lutnick said. A cursory investigation reveals that the federal government provided universities with about $60 billion for research and development in 2023. "If we give [the universities] the money, don't you think it's fair that the United States of America and the taxpayers who funded it, get a piece" of the revenue generated from patented technology?
Earlier this month, Lutnick sent Harvard University a letter demanding that it prove compliance with the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to patent technologies that were developed with federal funding, by September 5. The letter invoked the act's march-in rights, which allow the federal government to seize control of these patents, even years after a technology has been developed. The government has never exercised the right, per Bloomberg Law. Stephen Ezell, vice president for global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), tells Reason that exercising march-in rights would "decimate the intent of Bayh-Dole" because "companies would not engage with universities in licensing technologies in the first place if they were aware that the risk to their investments would be extremely high."
