Copyright Law

Apropos of my posting on how Bush lied about the availability of stem cell lines for research, the news is now full of stories about the pathbreaking work of the Japanese and Wisconsin (and Harvard) researchers who have developed a way to "convert" skin cells into stem cells.  It's engendering a lot of I-told-you-so's from conservatives, of course.  This new research sounds to be just the beginning of important opportunities to  develop life-saving cures that is being endorsed on both sides of the political aisle.  The question now arises whether the intellectual property practices of the funding institutions are going to block or enable open scientific research? 

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) which hold the intellectual property in this innovation as well (at least as concerns the Wisconsin team) has a bad track record of limiting access to its innovations even to the scientific research community.  Several of its stem cell patents were struck down as invalid and improperly granted by the USPTO.  Whereas WARF has made its patents available to researchers in the past, it is important to track the progress of the scientific conversation in this area of research lest  new advances be delayed as a result of greed.

Rick Weiss, Science Correspondent for the Washington Post speaking on the Brian Lehrer Show on NPR today, was too quick to dismiss a caller's concerns about how patents might limit access by scientific researchers.  His response made it sound as if there is some loophole in patent law that automatically guarantees access by researchers.  There isn't.  We don't know what patents have been filed or granted.  And we don't know how they plan to make their intellectual property available and under what conditions.  This work is successful because lots of people are paying attention to it and working on it at different institutions.  Let's hope that neither patent law nor the patent practices of the licensing institutions stand in the way of this collaboration.