Forget Patents: Why Open Source Licensing Concepts May Lead To Biotech Innovation

One of the main forces driving the move to open access is the idea that if the public has already paid for research through taxation or philanthropy, then it's not reasonable to ask people to pay again in order to read the papers that are published as a result. The strength of this argument is probably why, in part, open access continues to gain wider acceptance around the world. 

On Techdirt.

Another Expert Group Gets It

One of the heartening signs of things changing in the world of intellectual monopolies is that more and more groups and studies are coming out that highlight the manifest problems with the current system. Here's another one, this time from the Internation Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property.

Here's the nub:

The core finding is that policy-makers and business leaders must give shape to a new era of intellectual property to stimulate innovation and broaden access to discoveries. The current system, ‘Old IP,’ rests on the belief that if some intellectual property (IP) is good, more must be better. But such thinking has proved counterproductive to industry, which in health fields has seen declining levels of innovation despite increasing stakes in intellectual property. The era of Old IP has also proved counterproductive to the world’s poor who await advances in health and agriculture long available to the global elite.

The International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property concluded that a ‘New IP’ era that focuses on cooperation and collaboration is slowly emerging. Intellectual property is meant to assist in this process by encouraging cooperation among various brokers and stakeholders. The best innovative activity occurs when everyone – researchers, companies, government and NGOs – works together to ensure that new ideas reach the public, but are appropriately regulated and efficiently delivered to those who need them.

Although I don't agree we need a new era of intellectual monopolies so much as one *without* intellectual monopolies, it's still an important statement, given the stature of those making it. The full report is here.

Acceptable Intellectual Property

Although open genomics is one of the key areas of this blog, posts on the subject are few and far between. This is really a reflection of the fact that the whole area receives relatively little attention in the media. This makes articles that reflect on issues of openness and associated topics - notably intellectual monopolies - particularly welcome.

Here's one in the New York Times, which points to this very interesting paper entitled "Acceptable Intellectual Property":

Beginning in the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, decisions about intellectual property became visible and contentious public issues. A variety of actors—including many NGOs, academics, scientists, industry groups, and governments—now view decisions about intellectual property not as rational outcomes of an autonomous process of legal reasoning, governed by precedent and safely left to appropriate experts, but as political choices with profound stakes. Aside from a small band of libertarians, virtually no one contends that the answer is to dispense with intellectual property entirely. But there is a growing sense that the intellectual and institutional foundations of IP policy are too weak to manage its newly recognized political dimensions. Nowhere is this more true than in biotechnology, where controversies about the ownership of knowledge and biomaterials have generated profound public anxiety. This brief discussion paper outlines the sources of tension that animate these concerns and reflects on the capacity of existing institutions to reconcile them.

It's short, sweet and to the point: well worth reading. (Via Against Monopoly.)

Update: As so often is the case, the best commentary on this comes from Jamais Cascio, who also coins a fab neologism in this context:

Genetic Rights Management (GRM) is copy-protection for genes, a direct parallel to Digital Rights Management for CDs, DVDs, and other media.

Enclosing the Pharmaceutical Commons

The biotechnology industry has proposed to change the international generic naming of medicine ingredients, which at the moment are public property, into unique names for each medicine, making it harder to substitute them with cheaper versions, and linking them to trademarks, sources say.

And why are they doing this? Not to stymie generics that can be made available to those unable to afford high drug prices, oh my word, no. As Nathalie Moll of EuropaBio, the European association for biotechnology industries, explained, the change is

"not so much for us but for the patient"

Aw, bless 'em: always thinking of others these selfless pharmaceutical companies.