I came here and searched for the Bayh-Dole Act and am surprised to find only this single mention of it. It really does seem to me to be at the root of the curr

I came here and searched for the Bayh-Dole Act and am surprised to find only this single mention of it. It really does seem to me to be at the root of the current policies around federally funded research artifacts. I disagree with the causation you infer regarding public benefits as a result of this change in IP rules. After all, we saw many post WW2 benefits of federal spending long before 1980. The most visible were in aerospace developments that gave us the jet age, but of course even Silicon Valley was well on its way in the 1970s with lots of computer industry groundwork already in place. I think a lot of the computer industry developments of the 1980-1990s were almost inevitable once that stage was set. It was mostly a coincidence that Bayh-Dole was passed and universities ramped up their strip-mining of the federal budget around the same period. An awful lot of the current Internet age was built by people like me, working on open source projects and federal funding in spite of Bayh-Dole, not because of it.