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Intellectual property in the life sciences
To date, most societies rely mainly on intellectual property (IP) in form of patents as means to enable and secure innovations in the life sciences. This whitepaper is grounded on the ad-hoc hypothesis that the productive use of intellectual property regimes based on patents today has reached its limits. During the discussion at the Bio-Commons workshop, citizens questioned the usefulness of the concept of patents for the natural resources unraveled through modern life science technologies. Citizens asked, whether patents, such as the current IP regime, actually meet the nature of biological innovations. Precisely, how a genetic sequence, which was considered a digital code (a detailed examination of the ‘Code Duality’ see chapter ‘Bio-languages’), could fall under the protection of patents at all. Especially the fact, that genetic code is highly redundant and the correlation to the actual function of its corresponding protein is rather weak. In enzymes for example, the same catalytic activity can be achieved by a variety of protein sequences, as only a few amino acid residues of the chain are evolutionary conserved. Furthermore, does not the composition of a genetic code made by man equate better to a creative procedure than to an actual invention and thus some kind of copyright based approach would eventually suit better? To apply for a patent, high costs for a patent search and international registration done by specialists have to be mounted by the inventor. To defend a patent has become equally difficult and expensive and thereby often a patent creates more legal and financial insecurity than it provides security. A single patent becomes an asset as part of patent pool, far removed from its actual invention and its potential applications.  Simultaneously, there is a tendency of patents to become increasingly ‘weak’, meaning is less focused on an actual invention and often simply applied for out of strategic considerations by big companies. The long lifetime of a patent (up to 20 years) further increases the difficulty to safely introduce new inventions to the market. The legal costs and risks can prevent small companies from securing their intellectual property through patents, limiting them in their abilities to cooperate and others in their abilities to build upon their work. Today, products are becoming increasingly complex depending on a large number of inventions. Further, the speed of innovation, especially of that in life sciences had dramatically increased since the inception of the patent system. Therefore, patents can hinder the development and establishment of a new idea from early on, limiting the option to innovate to large corporations that can afford the legal costs incurred by the patenting process. Taken together, these tendencies lead to the creation of monopolies and subsequently induce market failure. A prominent and dangerous outcome of such a development in the medical sector is the decline of usable antibiotics in the market. In the chapter ‘Biostrike’, a brief scenario will be drawn investigating potential technological innovations to allow for decentralized and commons based drug discovery on the example of antibiotics.