Time to rethink intellectual property laws?

As a group of academics recently stated, the present impetus for similar legislation in developing countries "is fueled by overstated and misleading claims about the economic impact of the Act in the US, which may lead developing countries to expect far more than they are likely to receive" (see "Is Bayh-Dole good for developing countries? Lessons from the US experience" from SciDev.org).

We have been here before. The dotcom boom in information technology companies at the end of the 1990s was accompanied by a similarly meteoric rise in the value of small biotechnology companies, as venture capitalists hunted around for other technology-related investment opportunities. In many cases, the companies' sole asset was the promise of a patent on some critical gene sequence data.

When the dotcom bubble burst, the value of the biotech companies also collapsed, leaving many investors nursing heavy losses. Their mistake was not so much the decision to invest in biotech stocks, as an inflated belief in the value of science-based patents.

Radical innovation

There are alternatives available to developing country governments. For example, they can focus patent legislation on genuine technological inventions, while leaving publicly-funded research openly accessible, and rewarding researchers who come up with socially-valuable inventions through other mechanisms, such as prizes.

More radically, governments could promote “open innovation”, where individuals are encouraged to work towards technological breakthroughs. This approach has already been suggested in India, for example, to design new tuberculosis treatments.

Now is the time for radical thinking. We need new types of innovation strategies to meet future economic and social challenges, and to avoid repeating the mistakes of the recent past.

Protecting intellectual property will legitimately remain part of such new strategies. But science can only effectively contribute to these if it remains as open as possible. Duplicating the Bayh-Dole approach, and building expectations only of science's commercial value, is not the way to go.