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On Balancing Protection and Progress in Intellectual Property

This blog post is part of our Bridging the Gap series, a collection of interviews and blog posts investigating the transfer of knowledge, employees, and intellectual property between industry, researchers, and the public.

1961 Lego Toy Building Brick Patent / Patents Wall Art

As frustrating as patents are to researchers, there is a widespread need for Intellectual Property (IP) laws and regulations. Patents allow investors and companies to see returns on their investments. When a company or individual files a patent it both credits the organization or individual with the research, and ensures that they are the only ones to profit from the findings. Additionally, a patent can allow time for the filer to attract investors and begin up scaling their project or idea before someone else can poach it. Without patents, anyone could produce or use new technologies while preventing inventors from seeing returns, ultimately minimizing the hard work of the inventors, scientists and thinkers behind the work. An absence of patents would also make it exceedingly difficult to market the profitability of the idea to potential investors if unprotected from competitors during the development period. Legal protection of an idea or project offers security to prospective investors. While patents allow for security and protection for both investors and creators, the patenting system stifles innovation due to royalties attached to patents, preventing low-budget projects from progressing. This leads to one company or individual monopolizing the market for a period of time, until the patent expires or alternatives are discovered.

When a patent is filed in the U.S. most of the information on the idea is made public, but it is protected from competition. This allows other researchers and businesses to begin building off of the idea and progressing the technology even further; however, this does not happen with proprietary information. Proprietary information is an alternative method to protect IP, one I believe is detrimental to the scientific community. Proprietary information, or trade-secrets, is information companies wish to keep confidential. When a company lists a technology as proprietary information or a trade secret, they prohibit the public from their discoveries, leading to minimal scientific progress only benefiting the company who discovered it. This creates a monopolization of information. Both patents and propriety information create a type of monopoly, either with the market or with information. To prevent monopolization, alternatives such as open source have begun to grow in popularity.

Open source is a development model that promotes free access to technology and information for anyone to use in anyway they wish. While this is great for researchers and the progress of science, it is not appealing to investors looking to profit off of the technology. Open source is better for creating industry-wide standards insofar as the products and ideas used. This prevents researchers from having to recreate products and that already exist in order to progress. The pCAMBIA project, of the CAMBIA organization, is a perfect example of a well-managed open source technology. pCAMBIA is a series of vectors designed to aid in plant engineering. Plant engineering is notoriously hard to do because of large low copy plasmids that are difficult to construct in bacteria like E. coli. They require difficult and expensive techniques just for creating the putting the desired genes into a vector. pCAMBIA addresses this issue by creating vectors that are high-copy, small vectors in E. coli. According to their website, they have standard restriction enzyme cut sites, bacterial selection markers, plant selection markers, and easy-to-use reporter genes. All of the plasmids are easily found at labs throughout the world, and have helped make the field of plant engineering more accessible. Since they are open source they are readily available and have been cited in over 780 articles on NCBI. These plasmids are an example of an open source technology and allow for cheaper and easier engineering of plants. This model however is not sustainable for all technologies and ideas.

The CAMBIA organization does a fantastic job of balancing patents and open source. They try to balance scientific progress with economic sustainability of the research. Many issues with IP are addressed through this organization. They combine open source with patents by patenting certain technologies and open sourcing others. The technology that CAMBIA patent’s are priced differently based on size and available funds of applying organizations. This is the company’s attempt to promote research in low funding regions throughout the world.

There is an obvious need to protect ideas from competition in their incubatory stage, so the organization developing it doesn’t get run out of business. It’s nearly impossible to attract investors to support an idea if there is no proof of return on an investment. While this slows down scientific progress, it doesn’t hinder it nearly as much as the alternative of proprietary information. Open source is appropriate protection in some cases; however, it is hard to show the profitability of an idea to potential investors. Rather than treating patents and open source as opposing ideas, a hybrid of the two concepts would do more to create scientific innovation and maintain funding and returns on investments.

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