PATENTS AND FEDERAL MONEY

To The Editors of the Harvard CRIMSON:

Your editorial entitled The Great Patent Grab presented a onesided and incomplete description of the controversy. The pertinent question is whether denying professors who research with federal money the right to patent will impede the flow of discovery and invention. As far as I was able to understand it, the CRIMSON editorial did not address itself to this question. The editorial did charge that professors would be left with the alternative of switching from the university to industry. The implication seems to be that this would undermine the quality of research in the universities.

This is extremely unlikely. As the CRIMSON admits, major patentable advances at Harvard are rare. The professor might not fare any better in industry, where he may be required to sign away patent rights in advance. In addition the funds available in industry may also be from the Federal government. Keep in mind that the Congress is formulating a standard rule that would be applicable to all recipients of federal funds, including the industrial world.

Would the CRIMSON be willing to grant patent rights to firms for inventions paid for by the government? It might be dangerous to allow for a separate policy for the academic world. If professors were allowed to patent inventions, and firms were not permitted to, the federal agencies might tend to rely on industry, to the exclusion of the academic world, and that indeed would be unfortunate for science in the university.

Finally, it is not clear to me that professors who make economically profitable discoveries should be compensated more than professors whose research is as brilliant but is either less marketable or outside the scope of the patent laws. If the CRIMSON feels that academic renumeration is insufficient, then I agree wholeheartedly. That, however, is an issue foreign to Article I, section 8 of the Constitution.

The CRIMSON also alleges that a patent in the public domain will be profitless. This is a half-truth, and very misleading. There are two stages in the economic progress of an invention. To say that a firm will not produce the invention profitably without a patent is absurd, it is the equivalent of saying that Grand Union will never build another store because A. & P. will build one across the street. It is likely that a patent in the public domain will speed up the time lag between invention and widespread use, by rewarding the firm that produces the product first.

It is true that many inventions will not have an obvious application, and that firms will not take the risk of developing the product without patent protection. The CRIMSON, however, failed to point out that President Kennedy's memorandum in 1963 specifically directed the federal agencies to grant patents to the inventor where exclusive ownership was necessary incentive to call forth risk capital to bring the invention to the point of practical application. Of the six patent bills pending before Congress in 1965, five, including Senator Long's bill, allow for this exception. Kenneth A. Plevan '66, 1L