Team:HNU China/Parts

As iGEM rookies, we are concerned about the potential legal issues that synthetic biology raises with regard to intellectual property (IP) and patenting, expecially in the Chinese law system. Since we found few articles that seriously address this topic in the literature, we visit and consult with Professor Yu Ling at the Law School of Hunan University, who is an expert in the field of intellectual property laws. After a nice discussion, Professor Yu encourages us to further study the intellectual property right protection (IPR) issues of iGEM. As a result of our study, we collaborate with Shunan Tang, one of Professor Yu’s graduate students, and write an small article (in Chinese) to introduce iGEM and the relevant IPR issues to Chinese community.

In our article, we first review the history of iGEM, the competition system and the teams from China. The concept of open-source is then introduced. We point out that the fact iGEM embraces the true spirit of open source is the key to its rapid grow. We then discuss the patentability of Synthetic biology inventions and the applicability of a variety of articles of laws to Synthetic biology inventions.

Attachment:
The Open Source Innovation and Intellectual Property Protection in iGEM.pdf（论 iGEM 大赛中的开源创新与知识产权保护）