[Ecommerce] Nature: Drive for patent-free innovation gathers pace - Kamil Idris is being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to intellectual property

[James Love]

*  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

news

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. n

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@cptech.org
tel. +1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040