[ox-en] WIPO considers alternatives to patents (?!!!)
- From: Graham Seaman <graham seul.org>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:14:05 -0400 (EDT)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Love
To: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property
Sent: 7/10/03 7:03 PM
Subject: Nature: Drive for patent-free innovation gathers pace - Kamil
Idris is being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to
intellectual property
Nature reports that WIPO has agreed to organize the meeting on open
development models... jamie
* Francis Gurry, an assistant director-general at the WIPO, said that
the organization welcomed the idea.?The use of open and collaborative
development models for research and innovation is a very important and
interesting development,? he said in a statement. ?The director-general
looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a
conference to explore the scope and application of these models.?
in html
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v424/n6945/full/424118a_fs.html
or in pdf
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v424/n6945/full/424118a_fs.html&content_filetype=PDF
118 NATURE|VOL 424 | 10 JULY 2003 |www.nature.com/nature
***
Drive for patent-free innovation gathers pace
Kamil Idris is being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to
intellectual property.
Declan Butler,Paris
A group of top scientists and economists are asking the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva to promote open
models of innovation that don't rely on patents.
The group believes that innovation based on freely available knowledge
can be effective not just in areas where it has established a foothold
-- such as genome sequence data -- but also in sectors where patent
protection is entirely dominant, such as drug development (see Nature
424, 10?11; 2003).
In a 7 July letter to Kamil Idris, director general of the WIPO, 59
scientists and economists call attention to the "explosion of open and
collaborative projects to create public goods" in recent years,
including the Human Genome Project, the open-source software movement,
and Internet standards. Such projects show that "one can achieve a high
level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without
intellectual property protection," says the letter, arguing that
"excessive, unbalanced or poorly designed intellectual property
protections may be counterproductive." It calls on the WIPO to hold a
major conference on these models during 2004.
The signatories include Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in New
York, who received the 2001 Nobel prize for economics; John Sulston of
the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, winner of the
2002 Nobel prize for medicine; James Orbinski, former president of
Médecins Sans Frontières; and Richard Stallman, a computer scientist
regarded by many as the "father" of the open-source software movement.
Francis Gurry, an assistant director-general at the WIPO, said that the
organization welcomed the idea. "The use of open and collaborative
development models for research and innovation is a very important and
interesting development," he said in a statement. "The director-general
looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a
conference to explore the scope and application of these models.'
Advocates of open-source innovation want the WIPO and other public
agencies to rethink how innovation works, says James Love, director of
the Washington-based Consumer Project on Technology and a signatory to
the letter. Open research for drug development is one of the
initiative?s main targets, he says. Some of the authors are also
pursuing the idea of an international treaty to encourage governments
to fund drug research and put the results directly into the public
domain.
Love argues that research results should ultimately become a freely
available commodity, with drug companies competing to market generics of
any drugs developed. The current system, in which drug research and
development is carried out by drug companies that keep patent rights for
up to 20 years, is grossly inefficient and results in excessive prices
so that those who need the drugs most cannot afford them, argues Love.
Yet to be fleshed out are details of how such a model would work, and
how competitive forces could be maintained within it.But in May, the
general assembly of the World Health Organization instructed agency
officials to draft terms of reference during 2004 for a new evaluation
of intellectual property, innovation and public health. Consideration
of open-science models is expected to be part of this exercise.
"The success of the Internet and of open-source software has driven home
just how far open and collaborative projects can go," says Hal Varian,
an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has also
signed the 7 July letter.
Another signatory, Paul David, an economist at Stanford University,
argues that systems such as free and open-source software are not at
odds with intellectual property rights protection, but rather a choice
by creators and society as to the benefits they want to obtain.
118 NATURE|VOL 424 | 10 JULY 2003 |www.nature.com/nature Kamil Idris is
being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to intellectual
property.
-- James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, james.love cptech.org tel.
+1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040 ***
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