Analysis
Statement(s) from Inventor
“When you think about going to jail, it's so terrifying I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. But at some point I made the decision I wasn't going to let them use the criminal court to get something they weren't entitled to.”
Petr Táborský
Implications of Case
Chicago Tribune staff writer Ron Grossman summed the case up aptly in a 1997 article saying the verdict “makes him the first person ever imprisoned for stealing something that the U.S. government says he invented.”
When called upon by the State of Florida's General Counsel Dexter Douglass to justify their spending over $330,000 in legal fees for private attorneys related to the Táborský case , the University began to back pedal on its previous actions. Douglass said, “We are concerned that the government overreached in this young man's case.” The University spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and was went to great lengths to reassure their corporate sponsors of their ability to protect project results, all under the auspices of USF's President Francis Borkowski.
In his first days in office, Borkowski spoke to press and faculty about his goals while in office. He pushed for faculty to “aggressively pursue research money” and said that faculty members who did not engage in research have lost interest in their discipline and “can hardly be interested in teaching.” Borkowski promised to build USF into one of the top 25 public research universities in the country over the next decade. Perhaps the pressure of living up to these goals was one of the motivations to pursue the Táborský case with such intensity.
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