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Patentbezogene Veranstaltungen
James Love
Director - Knowledge Ecology International, Washington DC
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Patents are widely thought of as being primarily a system of exclusive rights, with exceptions to those exclusive rights limited to extraordinary situations. But in the modern economy, where issues of access, collaboration, and follow-on innovation are so important, it will be important to move toward a new paradigm for the protection of inventions that relies less on exclusive rights, and more on rights to remuneration, or new reward systems, that are only partly linked to patents.
One area where this change should be made is in the field of new medicines. It is ethically unacceptable that access to new medicines should be constrained by high prices. But it is also unacceptable that patents are used to impede science and innovation in this field, and that the present system delivers so little, in terms of new products that are medically important, at such a high cost.
Fortunately, the path for reform is becoming clear. For inventions used in new medicine products, we can eliminate the exclusive rights now associated with a patent, and substitute the right to earn rewards from new systems of “prizes” given to inventions that improve health care outcomes. For such systems to work, they must be based upon rewards that are large enough to stimulate investments in R&D, and they must also involve well-understood and transparent methods of allocating prizes among competing drug developers. Prize-type reward systems can focus incentives in ways that are more efficient than exclusive rights – by targeting inventions that provide incremental benefits over existing products.
A system of prizes to reward new products that improve health care outcomes does not have to be linked only to the patent system. Today, low standards of inventive step are often an indirect effort by national patent offices to protect investments. The protection of investment is also the basis for a growing number of sui generis measures such as protections of orphan drugs or pharmaceutical test data. A system of prizes for new medicines can reward products whether or not they are patented. By separating the amount of reward for drug development from the prices of the products, the patent system can play a much different, and more useful role, in establishing ownership over inventions that are part of a larger and more complete drug development effort involving patented and non-patented inventions and investments.
For patents on medical research tools, and in several other areas of the economy, including software and information and computing technologies, we should also think less about exclusive rights, and more about new ways to remunerating patent owners, in a world with greater freedom to use patented inventions. For example, governments should consider areas where sellers of products or services can simply set aside a reasonable fraction of sales to remunerate patent owners, in return for the ability to use without permission, the patent inventions. This can dramatically reduce the amount of time now spent bargaining over royalty rights, and allow products and services to be based upon the best technologies, while ensuring that the economy provide strong financial incentives to invest in new patented technologies.