Open Access News

The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea - so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms....The fight over the human genome and its patenting - and over the patenting of drugs - is another, and perhaps more familiar front in the war....Science was one of the first fields in which the confusion of ideas with things became apparent and damaging. It has always been one in which ideas and techniques were freely shared. You might say that any scientific experiment is worthless until it has been copied - if it can't be repeated, it isn't scientific. Scientific papers, too, measure their influence by how often they are copied or quoted in others. But as the practice of science has grown more expensive, and more commercial, so has the pressure to patent everything. The public project that sequenced the human genome, led by Sir John Sulston and Bob Waterston, defined itself as in opposition to patenting data. This wasn't just an idealistic stance. They were convinced that without freely available data the work would flow less swiftly, if at all, and that the results would be very much less useful. In fact, the so-called private project run by Craig Ventner used a method that relied on the availability of publicly sequenced data as a springboard for the short cuts it took. Sulston now, after his Nobel prize, spends much of his time campaigning for public access to scientific knowledge and its fruits. In a world where material goods are so unevenly distributed, the effort to lock up ideas and intellectual riches as well seems to him quite monstrous....It is not just the results of scientific inquiry, like drugs, that are controlled as intellectual property. It is, increasingly, the knowledge needed to make them or to understand how they are made. Where scientists once worked over a safety net composed of other scientists' experiments, they can now have the impression that they are working over a minefield composed of other companies' patents....This is madness. Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that. Intellectual property - treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded - is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.