© Tudor Banus
|
Academies
that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s
natural abilities as to restrain them.
Baruch
Spinoza,
Dutch philosopher
(1632-1677)
|
“Tightened intellectual
property rights
keep developing
countries out of
the knowledge sector.” |
As
patent claims surge and intellectual property rights are tightened, researchers are
struggling to safeguard the free movement of information, a key condition for pursuing
their work
We’re said to be living
in the knowledge society, but does this mean that knowledge is easier to come by
and moving about more freely? Has access to knowledge–a basic academic freedom–improved?
Technological strides undoubtedly make for easier access to information. But the
movement of knowledge is more than a matter of technology; it is also governed by
intellectual property rights, which impose their own limits. What is the “right balance”
between private ownership of knowledge and distributing it to the public free of
charge?
Many scientists, feeling their freedom is under threat, have taken action. MIT (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology), one of the leading university research centres in the United
States, recently announced that it is putting all its courses and teaching resources
on the web free of charge. Furthermore, over 22,000 scientists from 161 countries
have launched a boycott of science publication editors and started campaigning for
a “public science library.”
Legal
hurdles
“We
really don’t see why we should hand our royalties over to a publisher whose goal
is first and foremost a lucrative one, when we have done all the work,” says boycott
participant Michael Ashburner, a biology professor at Cambridge University in the
UK. “These publishing houses set such exhorbitant subscription prices that even in
rich countries, it’s sometimes impossible to gain access to some information. You
can imagine where that leaves scientists in developing countries.”
In the past few years, technological progress has prompted the U.S. Congress and
the European Commission to strengthen intellectual property rights. These reforms
gained a global character under the aegis of the World Intellectual Property Rights
Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), through the TRIPS accords
(Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). Since 1995, any state engaging
in trade has had to comply with this new legal order that covers such sensitive matters
as the length of time a text can be protected by copyright and possible legal exceptions
to this (known as “fair use”). By and large, exceptions cover private copy (for personal,
non-commercial use only) and quotation rights for scientific, educational and academic
purposes.
Under cover of international standardization, the length of time literary or artistic
intellectual property can be protected has just been increased from 50 to 70 years
after the author’s death. Concretely, this means that less scientific information
is freely accessible in the public domain.
Furthermore, computer product manufacturers have developed “technical measures” to
fight “piracy” and prevent copying (of software, databases and so on), which keeps
users from enjoying their full rights under the principle of fair use. Worse, trying
to steer around these “technical measures” could spell legal trouble. Soon, anyone
who tries to exercise legitimate copyrights could be prosecuted!
More generally, the scope of information and knowledge that qualifies for protection
is on the rise. Biotechnology, the human genome and even stem cells are starting
to enter this domain, creating tight restrictions on genetic research. The same goes
for “teaching methods” and databases. For a while now, there have even been attempts
to protect ideas and algorithms. So far, they have been unsuccessful. Major companies
such as British Telecom have filed for patents on hypertext links, others have done
the same in the multimedia field. The more patents1 there are, the more research
becomes fragmented and compartmentalized. The end result is that researchers’ freedom
is restricted.
The risk is that intellectual property rights become so tight that activities relating
to free academic exchange are legally endangered. For example, a Princeton University
professor has stopped teaching a course on certain software encoding techniques out
of fear that communication companies will take him to court. And an MIT student asked
one of his professors to sign a confidentiality agreement before reading his thesis!
Looking at these trends, one can only begin to question the purpose of intellectual
property rights. The main one is to guarantee the universal spread of knowledge and
inventions, in exchange for protection from the community for a limited time. The
desire to balance out the community’s and inventors’ interests is embodied in the
protection time limits and the principle of fair use.
The debate is raging between those who advocate longer time limits for protecting
works and scientific information, and those who argue that society needs freer, more
universal and less expensive access to knowledge. This debate symbolizes the quest
to achieve social acceptability for what has become commonly known as “the knowledge
society.”
In an economy of globalized knowledge, the issue is crucial for developing countries,
which hold just three percent of the world’s patents. The 1999 United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) report stated that “tightened intellectual property rights keep
developing countries out of the knowledge sector,” adding that the “relentless march
of intellectual property rights needs to be stopped and questioned.”
As researchers from the industrialized countries see the results of their work come
under tighter protection, their counterparts in the South have less and less access
to the scientific information required for developing products geared towards local
needs. For example, dependence of poor countries on imported medicine, which is expensive
and inaccessible for most of their populations, continues to grow.
On the other hand, Western researchers have free access to the scientific information
passed down from one generation to the next in developing countries. Since patent
laws do not recognize traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge, some scientists
have leapt at the chance to patent them to their benefit. In 1995, the UNDP reports
that two researchers from the University of Mississippi Medical Center were granted
the U.S. patent for using turmeric to heal wounds, an art that has been practiced
in India for thousands of years. To get the patent repealed, the claim had to be
backed by written evidence–an ancient Sanskrit text!
To fund research in the world’s public interest, some organizations, such as the
Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, suggest taxing patents
registered with the WIPO. In 1998, a tax of $100 per patent would have brought in
$350 million, a sum well above MIT’s annual budget ($226 million). More generally,
the legal framework of intellectual property should spur access to all forms of knowledge,
because that is clearly in the general interest. The issue will be on the agenda
of the World Information Society Summit, slated for 2003.
1. The WIPO says
that between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents granted in the world doubled and
requests for patents increased ninefold.
www.unesco.org/webworld/observatory
www.publiclibraryofscience.org
UNDP Human Development Report, 1999. |
