The reasons why the Board must retain control are clearly spelled out in the preambles in both existing policy and in the newly proposed policy. The University must be free to license inventions that were funded by the federal government without fear of prevention from doing so by an inventor. Such a veto places the university in a very awkward position with the federal agency funding the research that led to the invention. With respect to the healthcare-related technology, there is also a serious ethical dilemma created if the university is prevented from licensing and commercializing inventions because of personal financial interests on the part of an inventor. There are numerous possible scenarios in which an inventor could use the inventor's veto to block the licensing of a Board owned invention when, in fact, that licensing was part of a prior obligation such as contained within a research contract or in an option agreement.
Most inventions have more than one inventor.
Many of these inventors are graduate students or other personnel such as post-doctoral researchers who will leave or have left the university. It is not workable to be forced to obtain their approval on licenses before a university can execute such an agreement. Additionally, if, indeed, there are multiple inventors, there is no provision for a course of action if one inventor wants a license signed and another does not. The current policy can and has led to inventor disputes in such instances. Due to the fact that an inventor gets a share of royalties received under a license agreement, the inventor is placed in a conflict of interest between his or her responsibilities as a principle investigator or a researcher under grant funding to the university and his or her private interests as a beneficiary of royalties paid by the Board's licensee.