Nature: WIPO to Address Free Public Goods

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from CNI Copyright list)

---------- 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, mailto:james.love at cptech.org
tel. +1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040
***
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