Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9.1
BACKGROUND ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) play a central role in modern biology and
its related businesses. Negotiating the disposition of IPRs in research is an
essential element of most collaborations and funded projects and is the subject
of an extensive literature. However, “intellectual property” (IP) is in fact a
wide variety of disparate forms of protection and exclusive rights which apply
in different ways at different points in the scientifi c research cycle and the
business value creation and capture cycle.
This chapter begins with an introduction to the most common forms of
IP—copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret—as well as a brief treat-
ment of the relationship of how IP affects data and databases. The second
section of the chapter looks at the key transactional elements of a collabora-
tion, including materials transfer, patent licensing, and the way that those
elements can affect a negotiation. The third section of the chapter provides
some pragmatic resources for simplifying negotiations, reducing transaction
costs, and amplifying discoverability for materials and inventions created in
the course of a collaborative research arrangement.
9.2
SECTION I: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Intellectual property rights are inspired by traditional property rights—the
idea is that, just as one can own a hectare of land and maintain exclusive rights
to live on or develop that land, one can also own something less tangible, like
a discovery, or a method, or an expression, or a symbol, or a piece of music.
IPRs are based, at least in part, on the economic principle that the provision
of exclusive rights in these intangible assets creates a fi nancial incentive to
create more of the assets or develop them more completely through research
and development [1] .
IPRs cut through the life sciences at multiple points in the research cycle.
When a scientist takes notes in a laboratory notebook, he or she is creating
a copyrighted work—but is also fi xing some key elements of work that
might be used later to prove an invention as part of a patent application. The
scientist may treat that lab notebook as a trade secret until he or she is ready
to publish and the data on which the research rests are subject to a complex
and internationally patchy set of laws and regulations. This section makes a
brief introduction to the major elements of IPR and attempts to place them
in the context of collaborative biomedical research.
9.2.1
Copyright
Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author of a new creative
work, such as a song, photograph, blog post, or software. The primary rights
held by the author are the right to copy, distribute, and adapt what they have
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