35 U.S.C. § 200 — Policy and objective

This section states Congress's goals for the patent system as it relates to inventions from federally funded research. Congress wants to: use the patent system to encourage people to actually use inventions that come out of research or development the federal government helped pay for; get small businesses involved as much as possible in that federally funded research and development; encourage businesses to team up with nonprofit organizations, including universities; make sure that when nonprofits and small businesses create inventions, those inventions get used in a way that promotes fair competition and free enterprise, without putting unnecessary burdens on future research and discovery; promote turning inventions made in the United States into real products, and making them publicly available, through American industry and workers; make sure the government keeps enough rights in these federally funded inventions to meet its own needs, and to protect the public against an invention going unused or being misused; and keep the cost of administering all these policies as low as possible.