b.cognosco

The government extracts taxes from the citizenry, doles it out to universities for research projects, then grants the universities exclusive rights to patent and license the work they did for hire. Have I got this right?

Ivory Towers Fire Back Over Patents The National Law Journal 08-28-2002 In one of the latest intellectual prop. Law.com Aug 28 2002 0:34AM ET
[...]A major factor driving this university vs. corporation litigation was the passage in 1986 by the U.S. Congress of the Bayh- Dole Act, which enabled universities and other nonprofit institutions to own technology based on research that had been government-funded. The law also allowed these institutions exclusively to license the technology.
Prior to Bayh-Dole, universities could not take out patents on technology developed with government funding, notes Karin Rivard, counsel in the technology licensing office of MIT.
The passage of Bayh-Dole, Rivard says, set off a process at major universities of discerning and identifying any patentable inventions. Universities began filing patent applications and the patents "slowly began to issue," she says. "But these were embryonic technologies. It took years of development to bring these products to market." [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]

At least the universities tend to broadly publish what they invent, and it is likely that they actually invented something -- unlike some companies. It is also at least somewhat more likely that the university is more equitable in its licensing than corporations, I think. Still, this can't be a good development.