Free Republic

A Biden administration proposal concerning patent rights from institutions that take funding from tax dollars has raised alarms at one manufacturing group in Michigan, a key electoral swing state.The proposal in question, put forward by President Joe Biden's administration, concerns the federal government's ability to exercise "march-in rights" under the Bayh-Dole Act.Passed into law in 1980, the act allows certain entities, like universities and manufacturers, to own, patent, and profit from inventions produced by programs that received federal funding. The act also bestows the federal government with march-in rights, allowing it to compel these entities to license their federally-funded patents...

China has applied to patent a drug candidate being developed by Gilead Sciences as the government rushes to find the cure for the deadly coronavirus, a move that could raise questions on intellectual property and marketing rights. The state-backed Institute of Virology in Wuhan filed the patent for using remdesivir to fight the novel coronavirus on January 21, according to a statement posted on its website two weeks later on February 4. If approved, the drug will be used to facilitate its potential global market entry, it added. Studies have been conducted outside the human bodies and found that Gilead’s...

In today’s financial results, Nokia mentioned that it had increased cash inflow thanks to an “up-front cash payment of approximately EUR 1.7 billion, part of which was recognized in the second quarter 2017 results.” When Nokia announced back in May that it settled all litigation with Apple, they also said that they will update its capital structure optimization program, as one reader pointed out, which means Apple agreed to pay a big one-time amount. We contacted Nokia to confirm if the “up-front cash payment of €1.7 billion ($2 billion) (of which a part was recognized in Q2 results)” is from...

IBM went on the offensive Thursday when it added a countersuit against the SCO Group to the multibillion-dollar legal battle between the companies. The countersuit alleges, among other things, that SCO Group has violated the GNU General Public License, under which it accepted Linux contributions and distributed the open-source operating system. The suit also alleges that SCO Group doesn't have the right to revoke IBM's Unix license--an allegation backed by Novell, the former owner of the Unix System V source code that sold IBM its license. IBM is also attempting to turn the tables on SCO Group by alleging that...