New ‘Enclosures’ and the Creation of New ‘Common Rights’ in the Genome and in Software

Contemporary European History

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 255-271

  Cassier, Maurice ^a  

^a CNRS   (France)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85008539333     PISSN: 09607773     EISSN: 14692171     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0960777306003237     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. Rebecca Eisenberg and Michael Heller, ‘Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research’, Science 280 (1998), 1. Their idea is extensively discussed in Kieff, Perspectives.
2. A. Chakrabarty, ‘Patenting Life Forms, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, in Kieff, Perspectives, 3-11.
3. The Human Genome Project public consortium was the result of initiatives by research communities and political decisions by public research agencies, from non-profit-making research institutions to providers of government support.
4. M. Cassier, ‘Appropriation and Commercialisation of the Pasteur Anthrax Vaccine’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36 (2005), 722-42.
5. D. Kevles, ‘A History of Life Patenting in the United States with Comparative Attention to Europe and Canada: A Report to the European Group of Ethics and New Technologies’, Office for Official Publications of the European Commission, 2002.
6. See Rebecca Eisenberg in Kieff, Perspectives, 209-30.
7. The US Patent Office rejected it in 1992 on the grounds that it was of doubtful utility; but in 1999 the USPTO granted a very similar patent to Incyte.
8. EEC Directive 98/44, adopted on 6 July 1998, after its initial rejection by the European Parliament in March 1995.
9. Eisenberg discusses the two types of claims in Kieff, Perspectives.
10. ‘People think this is a biotech company. It's not. It's an information company’: Craig Venter, quoted in Davis, Cracking the Genome, 208.
11. See J. Boyle, ‘Enclosing the Genome: What Squabbles over Genetic Patents Could Teach Us’, Common Thread, and Davies, Cracking the Genome., 97-122.
12. ‘Towards a Theory of Property Rights’, The American Economic Review, 57, 2 (1967), 347-59.
13. See Boyle, ‘Enclosing the Genome’, 98.
14. For a useful discussion of the twofold nature of bio-information-part physical, part virtual-see Parry in Trading the Genome.
15. Heller and Eisenberg, ‘Can Patents Deter Innovation?'
16. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (1968), 1243-8.
17. Heller and Eisenberg, ‘Can Patents Deter Innovation?'
18. I. Cockburn, ‘O Brave New Industry, That Has Such Patents in It! Reflections on the Economic Consequences of Patenting DNA’, in Kieff (ed.), Perspectives, 385-98.
19. See R. Eisenberg, ‘Reaching through the Genome’, ‘Can Patents Deter Innovation?'., 209-30.
20. ‘Can Patents Deter Innovation?'., 229.
21. Thus J. Warcoin at the OECD seminar on ‘Genetic Inventions, Intellectual Property Rights and Licensing Practices’, Berlin, 2002.
22. In 1994 Merck went into collaboration with a federal laboratory to develop a public database for partial gene sequences.
23. E. Kitch, ‘Comment on the Tragedy of the Anticommons in Biomedical Research’, in Kieff, Perspectives, 271-3.
24. ‘Patenting and Licensing of Research Tools and Biomedical Innovation’, in S. Merrill, R. Levin and M. Myers, eds., Innovation in a Knowledge Based Economy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003).
25. The Bermuda Principles were adopted by twenty-five sequencing labs in some ten different countries.
26. This declaration was drafted by HUGO's Intellectual Property Rights Committee, which consisted of representatives of the public consortium and lawyers specialising in intellectual property.
27. In fact four-fifths of the sequence were produced either in US public laboratories or by theWellcome Foundation's Sanger Centre.
28. See von Krogh and von Hippel (eds.), Research Policy special issue on open source software development.
29. See S. O'Mahony, Research Policy special issue, 1179-98.
30. GNU is an operating system developed by Stallman and the free software movement. See Free Software, Free Society, 31-9, ‘the GNU manifesto’.
31. The open source movement places more emphasis on the financial advantages of free access to the source code; the free software movement stresses programmers’ freedom to co-operate.
32. See R. Kohler, Lords of the Fly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
33. R. K. Merton, ’ The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), repr. in The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. N. W. Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
34. D. Cohen, Les genes de l'espoir (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992).
35. See P. Rabinow, French DNA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
36. Human Genome Organization.
37. Kieff, Perspectives, 225.
38. The number of developers contributing to a project can be anything between single figures and several thousand, and the number of users anything between single figures and several million.
39. E.g. the open-source consortia under the aegis of the French Institut National de la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique.
40. See M. Cassier, ‘Private Property, Collective Property, and Public Property in the Age of Genomics’, International Social Science Journal, 171 (March 2002), 83-98.