Team:Oxford/P&P intellectual property
From 2014.igem.org
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<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2014/e/ea/OxiGEMDownloadIPReport.jpg" style="float:left;position:relative; width:95%; margin-right:2.5%;margin-left:2.5%;" /> | <img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2014/e/ea/OxiGEMDownloadIPReport.jpg" style="float:left;position:relative; width:95%; margin-right:2.5%;margin-left:2.5%;" /> | ||
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- | + | Our policy research in relation to students, the iGEM foundation, and policy makers is summarized below, or download the full report to learn more about our work. | |
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<li>Bethan Wolfenden and Philipp Boeing for organising and iGEM UCL for hosting the YSB event</li> | <li>Bethan Wolfenden and Philipp Boeing for organising and iGEM UCL for hosting the YSB event</li> | ||
<li>Andrew Russell, Glen Gowers, and Philipp Lorenz</li> | <li>Andrew Russell, Glen Gowers, and Philipp Lorenz</li> | ||
- | <li>Dundee, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and all the other teams which attended and | + | <li>Dundee, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and all the other teams which attended and had such enthusiasm for the debate!</li> |
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+ | <div class="white_news_block"> | ||
+ | <h1blue2> Government Policy </h1blue2> | ||
+ | <br><br> | ||
+ | Legislators have the difficult task of balancing a number of diverse and often conflicting intellectual property consideration. On the one hand, the government must incentivize innotvation - IP is an essential means of achieving this, as demonstrated by studies showing how patents can positively influence innovation by a margin of 15-25%<font style="vertical-align: super; font-size: 70%;">2</font> . | ||
+ | <br><br> | ||
+ | The flipside of this is the responsibility of the government to prevent the creation of monopoly and to ensure that ideas are shared so as to maximize productive research. Again, there is research indicating that intellectual property is crucial to maintaining this balance, as some studies have expressed concerns that patents on initial discoveries may 'delay, hamper, or deter' innovations building on the patented work. The transaction cost of working with patented material is unattractive to many researchers, particularly individuals and start-ups.<font style="vertical-align: super; font-size: 70%;">3</font>. | ||
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+ | Based on our research and our experiences during iGEM and in the field of IP, we believe that one of the most important roles for the government is to lead a new, more imaginative line of thinking about intellectual property protection, and to move away from analyzing these issues within the traditional and deeply engrained innovation v access dichotomy. | ||
+ | <br><br> | ||
+ | Creating legal mechanisms to support this kind of innovative and flexible thinking about IP will be increasingly important to synthetic biology and to iGEM as the field grows increasingly complex and the dynamics between the many different interested parties continue to evolve. In order to successfully balance the demands of the public interest, investors, the environment, researchers, and inventors we will need to be more open minded when considering how to deal with IP in the future. It will not suffice to simply ask whether 'to patent or not to patent' and suppose that this is the extent of the available options. | ||
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+ | A further issue which we believe needs addressing by a change in the law is the current incapacity of the law to provide protection for computer code and algorithms. This is an issue which extends far beyond iGEM. Counter-intuitively, the lack of protection for algorithms means that this information can justifiably be kept secret rather than being visible and accessible to the public and/or regulators. The danger of this situation was demonstrated only recently by Facebook's so called 'social experiment' during which the company controlled the newsfeed content of users in an attempt to manipulate their emotions. Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons Media Select Committee, expressed his 'worries about the ability of Facebook and others to manipulate people's thoughts in politics or other areas', and stressed the need for legislation in this area. | ||
+ | <br><br> | ||
+ | Similarly, some form of protection for computer algorithms might allow models relevant to the iGEM competition (and to synthetic biology more broadly) to be shared in a similar way to BioBricks. Engineer Leroy Lim, responsible for some of the modeling aspect of the project commented that it would have been highly useful to have models from previous years available at the beginning of the project. 'People would be far more likely to share their code and collaborate on this if we thought we'd get credit for our work...with companies it's even worse, there's no option but to keep your code to yourself because there's nothing else stopping competitors from taking everything you've developed and taking away your business'. | ||
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+ | </div> | ||
Revision as of 18:03, 12 October 2014