The World Intellectual Property Organization is an agency of the United Nations, containing one hundred and eighty eight member states, their goal is to protect intellectual property on a global scale. (1) They are one of the only UN agencies that is entirely self-funded. In 2014, over thirty five million Swiss Francs in dues were collected globally (2) by inventors, artists and business men/women the world over with the hopes of being able to sell their ideas for personal gain without infringement from imitators. According to the WIPO, “A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. To get a patent, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application.”(3)
Often in nature, organisms will develop synonymous organs or adaptations yet you won’t see birds and bats in a courtroom vying for a trademark. Are ideas and inventions so different? There is evidence that even Newton and Leibniz weren’t the first to invent calculus, yet no patent infringement claims were filed. I believe this to be a perfect example of how knowledge can’t be owned by any one person. The concept of owning an idea is an abstract one itself but it pales next to the suggestion that one can patent life. Monsanto and other agro-business giants have been developing genetically modified organisms and have bought countless patents to protect their investments. (4) A question that arises is, did they actually invent something new or just update an existing product?
The Open Source movement has been taking the world by storm in recent years because of the continuous progression towards less expensive, more efficient, and easily available technology. The Open Source Initiative is one of many groups supporting the spread of open source spread of information and technology. According to their website, one must provide the software/idea for free with no restrictions on modification in order to be classified as open source. There are many more stipulations including a strict no discrimination policy for individuals as well as “fields of endeavor.” (5) Unfortunately, this open door policy is not present in the world of “Big-Ag.”
The transparency of the open source movement is refreshing when compared to the way corporations control and manipulate their products and patrons to increase profits. In the above definition of a patent, given by WIPO, it states that “technical information” must be given to the public about the piece of intellectual property before it can be patented. While the information gathered about the IP should be gathered by and impartial group, there is too much room for corruption in our system that it can be hard to disseminate the truth.
“…most crop plants breed true, the ease of sharing, and the barriers to doing so were minimal. As with digital information, it is hard not to share, and hard to impose limits on sharing, so norms evolve to maximize value from this inevitability” (4)
This passage not only correlates the likeness of a physical product to an intangible idea, it illustrates that sharing will occur whether the “inventor” likes it or not. The path taken by the group known as Farm Hack have created a community that farmers can build their own equipment and learn new techniques by having real time transfer of knowledge with their peers. (6) One question that inevitably follows is that of monetary compensation.
“…You make money not by selling open source, but by using open source.” (4)
This concept of communal software will help all to develop better hardware. The most important question on my mind is can open source and intellectual property co-exist? In my opinion, no. Eventually, if un-changed, the system will allow those who embrace open source to be devoured by the patent giants who will only succeed through the restriction of the free exchange of thought.
- http://www.wipo.int/about-wipo/en/
- http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/about-wipo/en/budget/pdf/budget_2014_2015.pdf
- http://www.wipo.int/patents/en/
- https://blogs.uoregon.edu/foodsystems/files/2013/09/Jefferson-2006-2c1eivv.pdf
- http://opensource.org/osd
- http://farmhack.net/home/