> Why do people get to patent the products of federal grants?
A few reasons:
* The core hypothesis behind publicly-funded research is that simply advancing knowledge is a good thing. Patents (versus public domain, versus assigning a patent to the government) can change who benefits to what degree, but the raw public good is still there.
* Government grants often don't fully fund a research project, or interesting research happens as a byproduct of another 'core' project. That happened here -- undoubtedly the original grant said nothing about finding new dyes.
* Research grants don't fund all the steps to commercialization, they just fund "basic" research. Paradoxically, denying IP rights to funded research might stifle commercialization by making it not worth the effort to turn a lab development into a commercially-viable product. This is similar to the idea that old drugs and traditional remedies are under-studied in part because pharmaceutical companies cannot patent (and thus profit from) associated discoveries.
A few reasons:
* The core hypothesis behind publicly-funded research is that simply advancing knowledge is a good thing. Patents (versus public domain, versus assigning a patent to the government) can change who benefits to what degree, but the raw public good is still there.
* Government grants often don't fully fund a research project, or interesting research happens as a byproduct of another 'core' project. That happened here -- undoubtedly the original grant said nothing about finding new dyes.
* Research grants don't fund all the steps to commercialization, they just fund "basic" research. Paradoxically, denying IP rights to funded research might stifle commercialization by making it not worth the effort to turn a lab development into a commercially-viable product. This is similar to the idea that old drugs and traditional remedies are under-studied in part because pharmaceutical companies cannot patent (and thus profit from) associated discoveries.