06 Jan 2006 -- IPR/Mercenaries Meeting

06 Jan 2006 -- IPR/Mercenaries Meeting

				Introductions

				F Field

				Sri

				Drew Kelley - Drew's lab

				IPR as an impediment

				How to build into the system ways that industry/creator industry relations will work -- open source issue parall

				Raesh

				Knight's lab; CSAIL

				responsibility of leading edge practitioners to think about this sort of issue

				IRP: my research project is probably violating some IPR; impediment to research/knowledge

				Gautam

				PoliSci; PoET

				IPR experience on the applied side; phara industry practice; McKinsey IPR strategy development

				Ken Oye

				teach a course with some IPR issues

				interesting issues center on what should or should not be patented; managing property rights

				managing knowledge and ability to develop new knowledge

				Sara - open software/source model

				May want to draw in some people with more legal experience; know any patent attorneys

				law commons experience

				Duke meeting

				sri on the meeting

				John Wilbanks - Science Commons/Creative Commons

				publishing data; ways to share; creative commons for science; patent office stuff, rather than (c)

				group of lawyers, economists and scientists

				getting interested in synthetic bio; expectation of many issues in this area

				day one was primers; jamie boyle of duke law primer, drew as bio primer

				where to be in the next years

				day 2 was on normative things to do

				tasklist

				issue papers

				patents that are foundational blocks

				patented without real implementations in place

				some things

				obviousness issue

				elevate knowledge basis

				publish stuff

				articulate the issues

				see the notes Sri circulated

				other clarifications of the notes

				Sri on the Duke Law meeting

				took a bacteriophage that has function

				recreated the functions with biobricks

				is this copyrightable?

				note: self replicating

				register the copyright?

				pushing the issue could have negative fallout; eternal ownership versus patent short terms

				Decision not to submit for a copyright; but someone will

				What to have in place in preparation

				Some Questions

				what is protectable?

				Strategies to make it hard for stuff to enter/leave the public domain

				genes versus designs; reward investment versus supporting knowledge/science development

				Applications versus knowledge; drawing the line

				transistor story versus the surgical procedures

				patent pooling to close shop; if you aren't in the pool, you can't play

				surgical procedure patenting; allowed, uproar, shut down

				access only under unreasonable situations; the anticommons problem; prohibitive pricing of the patents

				public funding of research; private claims on the product

				in pharmaceuticals

				to get around a patent in an electronics field is easy; not worth protecting a patent because it's easy to make trivial changes that get you out of patent problems

				in pharma, there is no such thing as a trivial variant; therefore the patents are impossible to get around

				in which domain does synthetic biology fall?

				Also; how likely is it that patents will be a blockage given the timescale of patents

				how do the number of variations in ways to accomplish a specific function available; obviousness

				people aren't generally patenting sequences

				rather they are patenting the notion of function

				challenging it is difficult

				does progress in this industry depend upon (patent) protection

				synth bio support is a VC thing at this point

				some legal positions have been settled in order to set up this VC arrangement

				Codon Devices; Synthetic Genomics

				Someone thinks that the IPR value is there

				pre-emptive patenting, mostly on broad biological functions, rather on specific applications

				J. Keysling making a malaria drug

				berkeley patenting scheme is about preserving some kind of openess via patenting

				Strategies

				Bermuda Accords

				human genome project; no patenting, other agreements that put everything in the public domain

				something doable like that

				copyright viral models

				BIOS -- australians; made a way to patent a particular way of putting genes into a plant; you can use this patent pool, but anything you create requires you to put the patent back in the pool -- not working (patent-left); lack of participation

				clickwrap licensing

				PIPRA -- 20 universities published in Science; patents to good ends - "Do no evil" -- goodwill game

				pre-emptively generate a preexisting knowledge base before others get in

				How have patent challenges held up

				public patent foundation is winning lots of these in the biology area; so far in the copyright/patent courts

				Rochester patent-like failures; http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=689608

				http://www.pubpat.org/ -- Public Patent Foundation

				Standardization and patenting

				easy to work around; IPR easy

				hard to work around; IPR binding

				the worry is about patenting of basic biological function, rather than either specific gene sequences and/or specific uses

				USPTO guidelines for gene sequence patenting

				Evolving definitions of "use"

				Clarify the pharma patenting?

				patent the compound always

				Rochester case

				u of rochester; idea

				put together a patent that says that solving a medical problem by tacking the inhibitor site; general idea; not going to tell you how

				have to have the specific structure to get the patent: court

				Drug companies happy; universities in basic research is unhappy

				some patents in or out

				inverter stuff -- seems to be basic bio function, so unlikely

				zinc fingers? (sorry, I missed this)

				Ken's Hierarchy

				basic biological function

				specific sequence

				specific use

				Note: Some confusion about a biobrick -- agreement that a biobrick is "a specific sequence for a specific use"

				Patents in place?

				sequence and receptor; with or without use

				Use as a patent distinguisher; allows for extended consideration of protection

				Some summary things

				goals are what?

				incentives to innovate

				limiting restriction on fruits of innovation

				minimize anticommons; knowledge restriction

				incentives to do things for the field; maintaining the health of the field; polarization between the private and the public ideologies; how to avoid (premature) enclosure

				IPR may impede progress, rather than promote it

				what are the problems that might do this

				what can we do about it

				what is patentable

				what stands up in courts

				implications of different standards

				workarounds

				things to do

				biobricks license writing

				ken's proposal

				strategies to change the definition of patentable?

				strategies to clarify what the definitions are?

				strategies in the face of given definitions of patentable?

				lawyers

				is this like biology or is it like electronics? or is it like software? Note: once software gets large enough, we don't really "know" what it does, completely and intimately (otherwise, why regression testing, etc.)

				Cite for Bill Gates quote

				Strategy and Challenges Memo; May 16, 1991

				http://www.bralyn.net/etext/literature/bill.gates/challenges-strategy.txt

				Referenced in "A NEW PARADIGM FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN SOFTWARE"; Mark Webbink; Duke Law & Technology Review

				http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2005dltr0012.html

				Text of quote:

				Category 3 ---------- This is a category of challenges we face that I don't feel are widely recognized. PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't done any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas. A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom (available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the way patents are applied to software.