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Team:Lyon-INSA/HumanPractice
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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.
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.
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.
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:
