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Emperor Biden Wants to Nationalize Patents


By: Deroy Murdock / January 16, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/16/emperor-biden-wants-nationalize-patents/

Then-Sens. Bob Dole, R-Kansas (left), and Birch Bayh, D-Ind., confer at a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 21, 1980. That same year, the two lawmakers, now both deceased, co-authored a patent law that the Biden administration is now seeking to subvert. (Photo: Arnie Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)

If it ain’t broke, break it.

That’s Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly.

Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. And Biden devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel, even as the ayatollahs’ Houthi pals ignited the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles and anti-American drones.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat. 

On December 7, a date that shall live in infamy, Biden’s Commerce Department proposed a mechanism to invoke the so-called “march-in” clause of the 1980s-era bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act. This would empower Uncle Sam to capture and control patents that fully or partially were funded with federal research grants if Washington bureaucrats disliked the market prices or rollout speeds of their ensuing technologies.

“March-in” authority. What a perfect image: Jackbooted thugs stomping on private property and seizing it for Big Government. 

As usual, Biden hopes to capsize the efficient, productive status quo. Since then-Sens.  Birch Bayh, D-Ind., and Bob Dole, R-Kan., secured this legislation, universities and other institutions have owned the patents that emerged from federally funded research. Many then license those patents to companies and entrepreneurs who nurture them into goods and services. (Officially, the law is the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980.)

“Since its passage more than 40 years ago, the Act has spurred nearly 300 new drugs and discoveries that have driven the innovation economy—contributing $1.7 trillion to the U.S. gross industrial output and adding more than 5.9 million jobs,” according to Laura Savatski, former chair of AUTM, an intellectual-property licensing group.

Before Bayh-Dole, under 5% of federally supported patents were licensed. By 2022, AUTM data show, 9,884 licenses and options arose among that year’s 16,857 U.S. patent applications. By that measure, 58.6% of patents typically are licensed each year, nearly 12 times the pre-Bayh-Dole pace.

The resulting embarrassment of riches has improved lives from Kansas to Kazakhstan:

  • Google’s pioneering search algorithm
  • Firefighting drones
  • HDTVs
  • Honeycrisp apples
  • Nicotine patches
  • Rotavirus vaccines 
  • Taxol cancer therapy
  • Touch screens
  • Windows software
  • Zerit anti-AIDS treatments

Now, imagine life with few new amusements, business tools or medical cures. The ever-meddlesome Biden now wants new powers to reassign or simply nationalize patent licenses if his pests decide that these items are not marketed quickly or cheaply enough.

“Bayh-Dole did not intend that government set prices on resulting products,” its authors explained in The Washington Post. “The law makes no reference to a reasonable price that should be dictated by the government. This omission was intentional.”

Such Big Government caprice would karate-chop private investment. Why would venture capitalists license new patents if federal busybodies could march in, expropriate and award them to politically connected competitors?

Even worse, anti-capitalist bureaucrats could snatch licenses and sit on them while chanting “Equity!” “Social justice!” or “Climate!”

As it happens, no administration—Democrat or Republican—has marched in on a patent since Bayh-Dole blossomed. While screaming “Democracy!” Biden lusts for a nightstick to bash to bits this 44-year-old precedent.

Biden & Co. argue that when the state goes marching in, cheaper medicines will flow like the mighty Mississippi. This will prove to be yet another Marxist mirage, as drug companies avoid licensing patents for fear of being fleeced by the Everything for All crowd.

Taxpayers also will suffer if these patents cannot be harnessed. They never will taste the fruits of scientific developments that stay theoretical. They also will not collect the corporate taxes that commercialization now yields. In that sense, taxpayers’ return on federal research investment would dwindle, potentially to zero.

While America faces a $34 trillion national debt, and $875.5 billion in annual debt service, the marginal corporate taxes from these new products represent federal revenues generated by economic growth, rather than higher tax rates. Even the late, great Milton Friedman would bless such tax receipts. Assuming today’s 21% corporate tax, Bayh-Dole’s $1.7 trillion in blessings already would have rendered unto Ceasar up to $357 billion.

Bayh-Dole was “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century,” The Economist swooned in 2002. It “unlocked all the inventions and discoveries that had been made in laboratories throughout the United States with the help of taxpayers’ money. More than anything, this single policy measure helped to reverse America’s precipitous slide into industrial irrelevance.”

But 22 years later, Biden is not amused. As he bans gas stoves and incandescent bulbs, mandates electric vehicles, censors his critics, and labors to imprison the leader of the opposition, he increasingly resembles the late, but not-so-great Latin dictator Hugo Chavez. Giving Biden and his comrades the power to smash patents and grab them for “better uses” would imperil property rights and endanger innovation. It could cripple the conveyor belt that speeds modern marvels from university labs to Best Buys, Walgreens and Whole Foods across America.

Biden should peel his sticky fingers off Bayh-Dole.

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Law, Political

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The Biggest Winner in Biden’s Solar Panel Charade is Communist China


REPORTED BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JUNE 10, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/10/the-biggest-winner-in-bidens-solar-panel-charade-is-communist-china/

Biden and Xi raise a toast at luncheon at the White House

Even if it means granting the communist Chinese government economic alleviation, Biden is willing to throw his own countrymen under the bus in pursuit of his nonexistent, 100 percent renewable energy utopia.

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

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Since assuming the presidency last year, Joe Biden has been a tremendous gift to the communist Chinese government. Whether it’s repeatedly fumbling the ball on Taiwan or shutting down a Department of Justice initiative aimed at identifying and preventing spying activities by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Biden’s administration has been at the forefront of empowering an increasingly aggressive China that seeks to replace the United States as a regional and global hegemon.

On Monday, Biden decided to add another item to his ever-expanding list of policies that strengthen the CCP, with the Democrat president declaring an emergency under the Tariff Act of 1930 that exempts “certain solar cells and modules” originating from several Southeast Asian countries from new tariffs for the next two years.

“In recent years, the vast majority of solar modules installed in the United States were imported, with those from Southeast Asia making up approximately three-quarters of imported modules in 2020,” the emergency declaration reads. “Recently, however, the United States has been unable to import solar modules in sufficient quantities to ensure solar capacity additions necessary to achieve our climate and clean energy goals, ensure electricity grid resource adequacy, and help combat rising energy prices.”

“This acute shortage of solar modules and module components has abruptly put at risk near-term solar capacity additions that could otherwise have the potential to help ensure the sufficiency of electricity generation to meet customer demand,” it added.

While the declaration and Biden’s subsequent abuse of the Defense Production Act to boost domestic solar panel production will undoubtedly evoke cheers from climate alarmists, the emergency order simultaneously undercuts a significant ongoing investigation by the Commerce Department “into whether Chinese companies are circumventing existing tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S. by setting up shop in [Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia] to finish products whose life begins in China.”

Required by law, the investigation was first launched on April 1 at the behest of Auxin Solar, a U.S.-based solar module manufacturer that alleges Beijing conducts such actions as a means to “avoid the U.S. tariffs” by claiming that the components weren’t manufactured in China.

While Biden’s emergency declaration doesn’t halt the investigation outright, it does allow for CCP-connected businesses to go unpunished for skirting existing tariffs. As reported by NBC News, “Biden’s move Monday effectively takes the issue off the table for two years by ensuring no new solar tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries regardless of what the investigation determines.”

“Assistant Commerce Secretary Lisa Wang said that if the investigation finds new tariffs are in order, they’d kick in after the two-year period,” the NBC News report reads.

Axium CEO Mamun Rashid was quick to blast Biden over the emergency declaration, saying in a statement that the president “is significantly interfering in Commerce’s quasi-judicial process.”“By taking this unprecedented — and potentially illegal — action, he has opened the door wide for Chinese-funded special interests to defeat the fair application of US trade law,” Rashid said.

The Monday announcement from Biden came a day after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo revealed that the administration is considering a reduction of tariffs on various Chinese goods “in an effort to combat record-high inflation in the U.S.”

“We are looking at it. In fact, the president has asked us on his team to analyze that,” Raimondo said. “And so we are in the process of doing that for him and he will have to make that decision.”

Under Biden, China Wins and America Loses

Rather than boosting U.S. domestic production of oil and liquified natural gas as a means to lower rising energy costs and provide the country with a reliable source of efficient energy, Biden has instead opted to put the craven demands of radical climate alarmists above the general well-being of the American public. Even if it means granting the communist Chinese government, whose members have committed some of the most heinous human rights abuses in world history, economic alleviation, Biden is willing to throw his own countrymen under the bus in pursuit of his nonexistent, 100 percent renewable energy utopia.

While China’s state-owned solar manufacturers will flourish under Biden’s energy policies, U.S. fossil fuel producers and the American people will continue to suffer under the leadership of a confused, senile man, whose short presidency has completely destroyed the energy independence and sustainability of the United States.

Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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