Intellectual Property is an increasingly important and controversial aspect of scientific advance, and synthetic biology is perhaps the paradigmatic area illustrating the effects of this growing legal influence. When thinking about how teams could turn their ideas from iGEM projects into viable real-world solutions, we realized that intellectual property is a crucial area to address. Our team has produced a report exploring how teams can approach this task and how iGEM intellectual property policy can make the transition easier.
We begin with a brief overview of current intellectual property law (specifically relevant to the UK) before progressing to look at the challenges this poses for the iGEM competition. A number of different approaches which iGEM might choose to adopt towards intellectual property are discussed and the pros and cons of each are assessed. We then asked a range of interested groups, including iGEM students, professionals, and the public, for their views before arriving concluding with recommendations for addressing intellectual property concerns in iGEM. We offer our conclusions in the form of advice to students, to the iGEM foundation, and briefly explore how a change in the law could have consequences for iGEM. This advice is purely based on our own views and our research which we hope will make interesting food for thought - it is not professional legal advice and should not be relied on as such!
This page features summarises the conclusions the report; the complete document can be downloaded below.

iGEM Policy

There are four main types of intellectual property - patent, copyright, know-how, and business secret. <p> The table below compares the benefits and possible drawbacks of each...

Team Policy

Dealing with intellectual property is not only necessary on a competition-wide level - each team must also make decisions as to how they wish to deal with the intellectual property they will acquire during the course of their project. Deciding whether to file a patent application can be a tricky decision - below are just some of the factors you might want to take into consideration...

Government Policy

Incentivising Innovation

Early studies based on data from individual countries found that patents positively influenced innovation by 15-25%. 2

Encouraging Openness

Creation of Monopoly

Other research expresses concern that patents on initial discoveries may delay, hamper, and deter innovations building on this patented work. 3

...But the paper warns against the dangers of continuing to analyse IP issues from within the 'innovation versus access' paradigm/dichotomy.