Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe - Hardcover

Parthasarathy, Shobita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022643785X ISBN 13: 9780226437859

Verlag: The University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Over the past thirty years, the world’s patent systems have experienced pressure from civil society like never before. From farmers to patient advocates, new voices are arguing that patents impact public health, economic inequality, morality—and democracy. These challenges, to domains that we usually consider technical and legal, may seem surprising. But in Patent Politics, Shobita Parthasarathy argues that patent systems have always been deeply political and social.
 
To demonstrate this, Parthasarathy takes readers through a particularly fierce and prolonged set of controversies over patents on life forms linked to important advances in biology and agriculture and potentially life-saving medicines. Comparing battles over patents on animals, human embryonic stem cells, human genes, and plants in the United States and Europe, she shows how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent system politics. Clashes over whose voices and which values matter in the patent system, as well as what counts as knowledge and whose expertise is important, look quite different in these two places. And through these debates, the United States and Europe are developing very different approaches to patent and innovation governance. Not just the first comprehensive look at the controversies swirling around biotechnology patents, Patent Politics is also the first in-depth analysis of the political underpinnings and implications of modern patent systems, and provides a timely analysis of how we can reform these systems around the world to maximize the public interest.

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Shobita Parthasarathy is associate professor of public policy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care.

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Patent Politics

Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe

By Shobita Parthasarathy

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-43785-9

Contents

Acronyms and Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
1 Defining the Public Interest in the US and European Patent Systems, 
2 Confronting the Questions of Life-Form Patentability, 
3 Commodification, Animal Dignity, and Patent-System Publics, 
4 Forging New Patent Politics Through the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debates, 
5 Human Genes, Plants, and the Distributive Implications of Patents, 
Conclusion, 
Acknowledgments, 
Appendix 1: Major Events Related to the US and European Life-Form Patent Controversies, 
Appendix 2: Methodological Note, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Defining the Public Interest in the US and European Patent Systems

Patents appear to be governed through a homogeneous international system. While the system is organized by national and regional jurisdiction, the governing institutions, organized interests, and technical and legal experts involved in each look virtually the same. So too do the laws that reward inventors of new technologies with exclusive rights, which operate according to seemingly straightforward criteria: novelty, inventiveness, utility, and sufficient description in the application. These similarities are the result of more than a century of negotiation, from the 1883 Paris Convention to the World Trade Organization's 1994 Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, which harmonizes rules for patentability, for copyrights that are awarded for authored work, and for trademarks that protect brand names and symbols. In recent years many countries have also signed bilateral and multilateral trade agreements to strengthen these similarities. Governments and inventors argue that together, these treaties form a global regime that makes it easier for inventions to travel, for inventors to reap rewards across borders, and for markets to become transnational.

But this apparent uniformity masks key differences in the legacies, makeup, and dynamics of the world's patent systems. Throughout this chapter I demonstrate that for centuries even the United States and Europe, who have led most of these harmonization efforts, have understood patents and their appropriate governance quite differently. And they have embodied different definitions of the public interest in their patent systems. These approaches are the result of deep but often overlooked differences in political culture and ideology. These differences matter because they help to explain how and why the United States and Europe would respond so differently to life-form patents, and why their political environments began to look so different as the two jurisdictions navigated these controversies. They also call into question the depth of international patent harmonization.

From almost their earliest days, European governments treated patents as moral and socioeconomic objects that could produce monopolies with both positive and negative effects. They were guided by political ideologies that envisioned the marketplace as a part of a larger and preexisting moral order that they had a duty to shape and maintain. Thus, patent-system institutions had a responsibility to protect the public from harms, which included affronts to public morality, inequitable distribution of goods, risks to national security, and eventually infringements of human rights. The United States eschewed this definition of patents in moral terms and emphasized their status as legal and technical objects. The US government's role was simply to set the conditions for the market to flourish, with the assumption that market activity would ultimately produce the public interest. The inventor's interest, in other words, was the public interest. With this came somewhat different stakeholders, rules, and practices, as well as institutional roles and responsibilities. Over the course of the twentieth century, with the rise of economic harmonization efforts across the world and the development of a pan-European patent system, patent systems in the United States and Europe looked increasingly similar. But, the two places still thought about patents, their governance, and the public interest quite differently. As we will see, these differences would eventually reassert themselves and take on new meaning in the life-form patent debates.

Patents as Moral and Socioeconomic Objects

Patent systems emerged first in fifteenth-century Venice and England, as tools to enable the royal courts to create and expand markets. These courts bestowed patents upon entrepreneurs as privileges, allowing them to commercialize a technology exclusively in a particular jurisdiction. In return, the royal courts received revenues from the often-substantial fees they charged the entrepreneurs, while also benefiting economically from additional market activity, technological development, and technology transfer in the jurisdiction.

But by the sixteenth century, these patents had begun to provoke occasional public anger and frustration in England, because some patent holders used their privileges to set extremely high prices for their goods. This caused particular resentment in the case of patents on daily necessities, including salt and oil. Worried that this could lead to a revolt, the English Parliament issued the 1623 Statute of Monopolies to limit the power of patent holders in a variety of ways. It restricted patent length to fourteen years, calculating that this would give inventors the exclusive advantage of training two generations of apprentices to learn to make and use a new technology (previously, the patent term was set by the royal court, and could be essentially infinite). It required patent holders to make the invention in the country within a limited period of time or risk revocation. The statute also prohibited patents that were contrary to law or caused harm to the state by raising commodity prices, hurting trade, or being generally "inconvenient." Interpreted later as a public-interest clause that prohibited certain categories of inventions based on public policy or morality concerns, at the time the statute referred to inventions that might cause riots or other kinds of public disorder.

With this law, the English government envisioned circumstances in which patents could contravene the public interest. They could, for example, restrict access to some goods and provoke political dissent. And rather than placing the responsibility for such effects on patent holders, it understood patents themselves as having the potential to produce harms. It also understood that it was responsible for stepping in to reduce these harms and to ensure the benefits of patents. To put it bluntly, the government considered itself responsible for shaping the impacts of patents and the market.

More than a century later, the French began to develop what is now known as the "modern" patent system. They reconceptualized patents as bundles of natural legal rights, rather than simply as exclusive privileges, that gave their owners greater power and focused on rewarding innovation rather than just entrepreneurship. France's 1791 patent law also included a "failure to work" provision and an ordre public clause that echoed the public-interest language in the Statute of Monopolies. The French understood the ordre public clause to prohibit...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022643785X
• ISBN 13: 9780226437859
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar