Team:Lyon-INSA/HumanPractice

Our human practice project includes two themes gathering many very different questions, which explains why we divided it into two parts. The first one is about the intellectual properties issues in general and is made up by a reflexion on the economic issues the synthetic biology industry is facing and by a resume of our work on the intellectual property with the UBC iGEM team. The second one focuses on the popularization of sciences and more specifically on our contribution to the researchers’s night.

Part I :Intellectual property issues

Introduction

Free knowledge sharing is part of the foundational principles of the iGEM contest. Consequently, protecting the possible commercial uses of the iGEM team members’ projects seems hardly feasible by common ways (i.e. copyrights, trademarks and patents). However, the intellectual property rights in general and patents in particular are commonly known to be the only way to promote innovation in a profit-making logic: if companies cannot secure the economic outcome of their investments in R&D, they merely will not invest in it. A simple conclusion could then easily be drawn from these very statements: promoting the commercial & industrial use of the iGEM projects should be impossible.

Nonetheless, the decision of opening an iGEM entrepreneurship division, whose objectives are clearly to optimize the economic opportunities given by the performing iGEM innovation system, vigorously shook this last conclusion.

The aim of this human practice project is to show that patents are not always the best mean to promote innovation and to ensure viable alternative models do exist. More precisely, the commons’ system will be discussed. We will assume the iGEM team members form a commons similar to the Open Source community of the IT sector to strike up a reflexion on the development of alternate economic solutions to patents.

We will most notably refer to both Joseph Stiglitz’s (Nobel price in economics in 2001) and Elinor Ostrom’s (Nobel price in economics in 2009) theoretical work on the intellectual property regime to back up our study.

Henry & Stiglitz directly propose the open sources systems, which usually are linked to the IT sector, to be an alternate solution to the patents' issues. Nonetheless, the open source community is not discussed here : they are actually referring to it as a global socio-economic concept : the commons.

The patent system: an efficient economic model ?

What is a patent, how is it awarded?

A patent grants its owner a monopoly in a country on an invention he was the first one to describe. At a firm's scale, this also means being able to shield the potential commercial operation based on the research work of a company against its competitors. Besides, it rewards this work by granting the patent’s owner an economic advantage that will probably make the financial cost of the R&D be worth it. The perspective of this heavy economic asset is the major reason why patents are said to be a driving force that encourage innovation.

Nonetheless, such a profit-making privilege has a price. Indeed, targeted invention have to meet tough conditions for a patent to be granted. Consequently, knowing the delivery conditions is very important to fully understand the patent system.

A patent is granted:

for a new invention never publicly revealed, which can lead to industrial applications ;

on a precise territory ;

for a maximum of twenty years ;

to the one who revealed the invention and described it with enough precision.

NB : A patent has to be paid annually for its delivery and maintaining.

In the field of synthetic biology, the 1930 plant patent act marked the beginning of a new economic era for biology as emerged with it the patentability of the living world. Nowadays, even the genetically modified bacterias are patentable (the latter have been patentable in the USA and then in Europe since the beginning of the 80s).

The goal of this brief study though, is not to discuss this matter.

Why patents have been created?

In France, patents have been created after the 1789 French Revolution. They were then considered as a human right : their aim was to recognize the inventors’ rights on their ingenuity. And so was born the first legal mean to claim authorship of an invention: a new age for intellectual property began.

Instead, the justification for patents became quickly socio-economic. Patents are now conceived as an incentive for production and knowledge spreading. When a patent is awarded, the description of the invention goes public, in exchange for a maximum twenty-years monopoly to the originator.

Subsequently, patents are actually supposed to promote innovation and the disclosure of technological knowledge, which means allowing the latest innovations to be available to anyone, though their commercial use is forbidden without a license from the patent owner until the patent’s end. On the one hand, the benefits that patents are expected to offer to society are very clear as their design is specifically supposed to improve the global technological level. Indeed, huge technological steps have been made since the patent’s creation (although it is not the only factor). On the other hand, stimulating the competition for the market (i.e for “new” markets) by granting some kind of monopoly rents generates economic costs for society, which derives from a weakening in the competition in the market (i.e. in the “same” market).

As a result, the patent system rests on a socio-economic balance, in which society is supposed to be beneficiary. Nevertheless, as we will further see, this balance is fragile and depends on the answers to the following questions :

What is the patentability scope ? What can be patented ? ;

How patents are granted ? (i.e. the toughness of the conditions required) ;

What are the rights of the patent owner ? ;

How long do these rights last ?

Economic limits of the patent model

Several factors (change in laws and in the practices of patent offices, technological and industrial evolution, etc.) may lead this balance between social costs and advantages to be broken., the results being innovation led to be inhibited.

For instance, narrow patents are sometimes granted to different companies on very specific elements, whose gathering may be necessary to bring on innovations. Nowadays, major worldwide companies use patents as defensive or offensive tools to block rivals on some components of diverse products. These rivals strike back by doing the exact same thing on other components so that they are mutually blocked (“patent thickets”). As an example Google has recently bought Motorola Mobile and its 17000 patents for 12 billion dollars, which means they spent a lot of money to get these patents probably as offensive / defensive ends instead of spending it into pure R&D. Consequently patents sometimes paradoxically discourage innovation.

Furthermore, some patents may protect wide discoveries (also known as foundational patents). For instance, the patent granted to Myriad genetics covered the whole gene functions of BRCA1 and BRCA2 and all applications that could follow on possible ways to diagnose and cure breast cancer. This kind of patent stood against innovation, preventing any creative use of those genes by any other actor than Myriad Genetics, or leading to any other use linked to this DNA sequence (possibly there would have been many, considering the complexity of biological regulations).

As a consequence, the patent system may have allowed the formation of major entry barrier on some industrial domains. For instance in the pharmaceutical industry's market in which new companies cannot easily enter anymore because they would need to buy the licence of many expensive patents from the incumbent firms.


Last but not least, the philosophical questions raised in the two last centuries concerning patents are to be considered. As this is not a philosophical essay, we will content ourselves with a brief resume. According to the American economist Thorstein Veblen (1908), a patent is illegitimate as it privatizes a collective work (any invention crucially depends on the previous ones : how would a trolley have been invented if the wheel had not been invented before ?). Veblen emphasizes this idea as he says :

The initiative and technological enterprise of individuals, such, e.g., as shows itself in inventions and discoveries of more and better ways and means, proceeds on and enlarges the accumulated wisdom of the past. Individual initiative has no chance except on the ground afforded by the common stock, and the achievements of such initiative are of no effect except as accretions to the common stock. And the invention or discovery so achieved always embodies so much of what is already given that the creative contribution of the inventor or discoverer is trivial by comparison. (1908)

This thinking still applies nowadays on different themes. For instance in the pharmaceutical industry drugs are often the outcome of multiple actors : public research, companies’ R&D, hospitals and patients that accept to be guinea-pigs... So the question remains : why should a sole actor gather all the economic benefits from this collective process?

Consequently, in some cases, having an economic alternative to the patent system may actually be a good thing. The leading economists Claude Henry and Joseph Stiglitz write :

The patent system is only one part of a society's innovation system, through which the production of knowledge is financed, incentivized and organized. Too much attention has been focused on IPR (intellectual property rights), and too little on alternatives, e.g. open source systems, publicly financed innovation and prizes. (2010)