Actually, it appears the other way around because of this:
How the patent is exploited may well benefit your taxpayers but we are not socialist and society does not have any rights to this intellectual property.
The idea about patents as pertains to this country came from the Founders, who thought all knowledge should be free, belonging to everybody. However, some like Madison believed that a limited temporary monopoly on the use of that knowledge could be incentive to create even more; the benefit to society would be more than the "evil" (his exact word) of the monopoly. Therefore he argued for the existence of patents and copyrights, thinking that the will of the people could prevent the abuse of these monopolies. Jefferson was against even this limited monopoly, fearing its inevitable abuse. Boy, was Jefferson right, probably even more than he could have imagined. "Intellecutal property"? Bah, "Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." -- Thomas Jefferson.
Now given that, the constitutional basis of copyright is to provide a monetary incentive to people to invest time and/or money to produce more advances that can get the protection of patent in order to recoup the investment. But the government is providing the money here, the government paid for their time. Therefore there is no consitutional basis for granting them a patent.
I do know what our patent and copyright systems have eroded into, a vast unconstitutional monster. Thus I know why they would be granted a patent under the current unconstitutional system. I just don't think it's right.
Second, the patent is “owned” by the individual or organization employing the individual(s).
And even if you want to go that way, the government is the one paying for it all, so the government is the end employment organization and gets to have the patent.
My tax dollars are being used to directly fund corporate profit. I see something wrong with that. If corporations want the profit, they should pony up the R&D funds and assume all the risk. Laying the risk on the taxpayers yet still reaping the profit is wrong.
In my somewhat limited experience, patents are a bit more nuanced. The purpose of a patent is actually to disseminate knowledge. The temporary ‘monopoly’ is in exchange for disclosure, so that others can develop new inventions based on the old. The alternative is to keep everything as a trade secret and no one can work off it.
Filing a patent helps commercialization. Most companies will not develop things that are not patented, since the intellectual property is difficult protect in its absence. At the university where I work, intellectual property resides with the university by state law. The revenue comes from licensing the intellectual property for commercialization. In my mind, patenting is not the problem, it is that the government does not have a logical method for ownership and licensing to obtain its return of investment. A lot of NIH work becomes profit for big Pharma based on government investment that is all but gratis for the company.
Los Alamos itself retains a lot of patent & copyright and patent/copyright royalty interest in what is derived from its research, and in recent years has taken a direct equity stake in companies paying royalties to use its patents, directly earning revenue back into Los Alamos for further research.
The history of how it came about that Los Alamos went from a government agency to a government controlled private technology development outfit; Los Alamos National Security, LLC, I don’t know. But pieces of that knowledge is revealed in this link:
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/tt/pdf/tt_progrpt_05-06.pdf