• The Bayh-Dole Act allows research universities to obtain rights to patents on the results of their NIH funded research.

• The Act encourages university patent owners to grant exclusive patent licenses to pharmaceuticals companies.

• Failure to enable companies to obtain exclusive rights to chemical compounds identified in NIH funded research provided a disincentive to engage in screening such chemicals.

• Did Bayh-Doyle eliminate this disincentive?

Professor Roberto Mazzoleni Hofstra University, Professor of Economics

• Discussion of issues related to Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It, by Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner

• Patents have become too easy to obtain.

• Patent rights are too strong.

• Patents impede innovation.

• These problems can be traced to creation of the CAFC and making the PTO a financially self supporting agency.

• Suggested solutions.

Professor Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School

• Discussion of issues related to Patent Failure-How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk, by James Bessen and Michael Meurer

• Empirical evidence shows that patents do not perform like property.

• The U.S. patent system has subsidized chemical and pharmaceutical innovation in other industries by publicly traded U.S. firms.

• The U.S. patent system has deteriorated because of the public notice function.

• Notice failure is attributed to problems with claim interpretation, continuation practice, weak application of the enablement standard to software patents.

• Effective patent reform requires improved notice.

Professor Michael Meurer, Boston University Law School

• Is there a lack of clear notice regarding infringing activities and does a perceived lack of notice result in forgoing filing a patent application or enforcing a patent.

• Whether perceived confusion regarding legal standards of patentability is a disincentive to innovate.

• Are the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit or the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office primary sources of perceived impediments to innovation.

• Will alternative policies change the patent system.

Professor Michael Rustad, Moderator, Co-Director IP Law Concentration

Leigh Martinson, Esq., McDermott Will & Emery

Mary Murray, Esq., Hamilton Brook Smith & Reynolds

Scott Pierce, Esq., Hamilton Brook Smith & Reynolds

• Recent debates have examined the possible ways in which expanding IP rights shape the academic and commercial development of scientific research.

• The impact of patent fragmentation on research.

• The impact of broad patents over key upstream research tools and materials.

• The impact of changing patent enforcement over research.

• The ways firms and communities come together to shape the norms and
  practices of IP enforcement.

Professor Fiona Murray, MIT Sloan School of Management

• The use of IP in current biotech business models is failing.

• A new IP era is on the horizon in which collaboration and partnership will
  become more prominent.

• Government, industry and universities will need to manage this change to
  benefit from it.

• This involves government investments in partnerships, universities altering their patenting and licensing practices and industry investing greater amounts in pre-competitive research and in developing mechanisms to deliver biotech products to those most in need.

Professor Richard Gold, McGill Law School, Montreal, Canada