This article defends the use of patents by colleges and universities to protect inventions created by their faculty. To its credit, it identifies the grounds for recent objections to the practice and meets them on those terms. In response to the charge that patents violate traditional academic openness, for example, the author responds that " Academic patents have nothing to do with preventing openness. By definition, a patent is an open document available to teach the world what its inventor has learned." The author also argues - with some force - that non-exclusive licensing means that no inventions are ever commercially developed. "For 30 years after World War II, the United States had precisely the policy of nonexclusive licensing... Under this system, no drug that the government owned rights to was ever developed and became available to the public."
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