"The public" seems like a reasonable option. The public pays for it, and in return, the public gets that 'intellectual property'.

It's not quite as simple as that. The public pays these researchers' salaries, but part of the bargain is that they get to profit from anything they patent. If that were no longer the case, a lot of researchers might jump ship to the private sector, where they get higher salaries in return for their employer controlling their research. In any case, it's not fair to change the bargain retrospectively. The promise of being able to patent and otherwise profit from their research is part of the bargain in the existing status quo, and an important part of that bargain.

That's the model of industrial labs. You get a salary. IP is owned by the company. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was some institution (a University is a perfect example), which similarly pays its researchers a salary (sure, it should match the private sector salaries) and the resulting IP is public ___domain.

Heck, it would promote the private sector to devote more resources to research ... if the private sector made a discovery, they could patent it and get exclusivity. If a University did it, it belongs to everyone.

The public pays for it, but often times, so does industry.

Having been involved with some of these Industry/Academic partnership grants, some of them are not what you think. The worst I have seen are simply corporate welfare, using colleges to launder the source of the money.

Then it should be separate, patent-free with public money, patented with industry money.