IP Rights Impact Practice Of Science, Global Justice, Author Says

Intellectual property has a strong effect on the practice of science, leading to a shift in research attention for the benefit of the rich, while impeding access to essential goods for the disadvantaged, according to a recent book.

The book by Cristian Timmermann, post-doctoral research fellow at the Jacques Loeb Center for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, explores the “complex interaction between intellectual property rights, life sciences and global justice.”

Life Sciences, Intellectual Property Regimes and Global Justice, was written as a PhD thesis at the University of Wageningen, in the Netherlands. According to the author, “our intellectual property regimes clash at various points with human rights law and commonly held notions of justice.”

Intellectual property has “profoundly strengthened the belief that science can and should be self-financeable,” he says. This negatively affects several types of scientific work that cannot be protected by intellectual property, such as indigenous innovation, fundamental research, and incremental innovation.

The author also contends that intellectual property requires that innovation produces goods that are homogenous, “something that disfavours indigenous innovation and is a disincentive for the maintenance of agrobiodiversity.”

“Favouring one type of scientific work over other forms implies that one has a greater societal value than the other. In many cases this has nothing to do with social utility,” he says.

Intellectual property rights, which are unevenly distributed between the North and the South, distort a fair appraisal of research efforts,  Timmermann says.