Don’t Loose the Box top
4th June 2016
Last weekend I attended a conference at National Law School Bangalore. The conference was about Open Access and IP. The participants were mainly from law background, many academicians, some corporate lawyers, some independent practitioners, some working for non profits and some bureaucrats.
The conference was divided into a lots of panel discussion focused on various topic, where each panelist speaks for 15 to 20 minutes followed by a question and answer session. The first day also had a keynote by Professor Richard Jefferson. He talked about the fascinating history of IP and also his own personal story of how he created Lens. He used the metaphor of solving a jigsaw puzzle to show various barriers faced by today’s innovators. To solve a jigsaw puzzle. Two solve a jigsaw puzzle you need to have two things:
1. All the pieces of the puzzle
2. The Box top which has picture of how the final solution looks like
Earlier innovators faced a lot of issue because of secrecy. Patents were created so that people bring their pieces in return of gaining exclusive right to use that piece for a short duration of time, of course not to say there aren’t issues with this approach but the gist of IPR is giving exclusive rights as a means to a greater good rather than an end in itself. Professor Jefferson’s project Lens aims to solve the second problem, you cannot solve a problem which you cannot see. With full text patent search, metadata, citations and visualizations Lens attempts to bring more clarity to pieces which are present and ultimately how they can be put together.
Here are other take aways:
- Jayashree Watal discussed a very interesting concept of Automatic Compulsory License for patents. The idea is that instead of giving an exclusive right to the patent holder to use the product or process, automatically give a compulsory license to anyone who may wish to use the patent and for every sale of a product using the patent a fraction of revenue goes back to the inventor as royalty. For example if you have a patent on a camera technology and I want to use in a phone company is creating, I won’t have to take permission from you, instead I’ll just to go ahead make the product, sell it and pay a royalty fixed by the court. This system has several advantages over the existing model of exclusive right, here:
- Patents don’t block the innovation of others.
- It discourages corporates from using Patents as legal arsenals rather than real
innovative things which can monetized. - Prices will be set by a competitive market.
One of disadvantage of system is that it is not clear how the royalties be decided.
- Prashant Iyengar talked about the transparency in governance. His main thesis was that IP hasn’t been an issue while getting information and records from the government. The RTI Act has an exception to information disclose in case of IPR issues. Government departments have sometimes said that they cannot disclose some information because they have IP over it but Central Information Commission has usually trumped the need of transparency over the need of government departments to protect their IP. The bigger issue is lack of bureaucratic will to uphold transparency, often they loose records and documents and sometime they give information in formats which is completely useless.
- Prashant Reddy talked about transparency in the law drafting procedure. The parliamentary standing committee often cites parliamentary privilege to block access to the discussion that go into drafting a particular bill.
- One interesting point raised by Professor Natasha Nayak was that Standard Setting Organizations(SSOs) can be considered as a cartel because they eliminates inter technology competition. Whenever a new technology is coming there are always alternatives, SSOs chooses one technology over other, instead of allowing competition to decide the winner.
- Zakir Thomas talked about drug patents and said that most of the Phase I and Phase II funding for new drugs comes through governmental bodies and the contributions from big pharma goes into conducting the clinical trials and putting the drugs into the market. He also showed that more patents doesn’t equate to more products. (See Also: “The Entrepreneurial State”)
- Panel discussed that how the drug Sovaldi has changed the public discourse on drug pricing and is making people realize the actual cost that goes into making a drug. Drug companies justify the cost of drugs by saying that this is the value which the drugs brings into the market comparing it to cost of existing treating etc. Which is kind of saying that they price the drug at costs which people are willing to pay (for their lives).
Edit:
- Some of the conference videos are available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy-IZ3VY2msSYLBPMiSKrSUkjsbmH4foy
- And the official conference report can be found here http://spicyip.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Consilience-2016-Report.pdf
