Bonaccorsi, Calvert and Joly (2011). "From protecting texts to rotecting objects in biotechnology and software", Economy and Society, 40 (4), 611-639 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Open Access, Intellectual Property, and How Biotechnology Becomes a New Software Science
2009
Abstract: Innovation is slowing greatly in the pharmaceutical sector. It is considered here how part of the problem is due to overly limiting intellectual property relations in the sector. On the other hand, computing and software in particular are characterized by great richness of intellectual property frameworks. Could the intellectual property ecosystem of computing come to the aid of the biosciences and life sciences?
The Mutability of Biotechnology Patents: From Unwieldy Products of Nature to Independent 'Object/s
Theory, Culture & Society, 2010
This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological 'objects'. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy (and thus unpatentable) realm of the natural world. The creation of 'objects' also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are better understood as ontologically fluid (though, as discussed, this fluidity can only occur within limits), which is to say their identity cannot be 'fixed' -or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today's biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms.
Journal of Indian Law and Society, 2022
With innovation in genetic engineering now being rewarded in the form of intellectual property rights, there are new things that are beginning to count as property and as objects of human invention—plant varieties, seeds, germplasm, genetic sequences, DNA, and so on. To bring the realm of “biology” within the ambit of intellectual property, to juridify aspects of the biological as products of human invention is to bring new epistemic objects into visibility. While these are revealed through practices of biotechnology, law translates it into a capacity for monopolistic appropriation for biotech innovators. The new correlatives of innovation and intellectual property re-engineer not just the biology of an organism, but the very categories that organised property and intellectual property. What instrumentalities of technology and law co-produce biotic property? I examine these instrumentalities in a two-paper series: while the first paper seeks to lay out the work of technology in the creation of new biological artefacts, and consequently new economic spaces and property claims, the second paper seeks to examine the role of law in translating inventive claims as property claims.
Infringing Software Property Rights: Ontological, Methodological and Ethical Questions.
Philosophy & Technology, 2019
This paper contributes to the computer ethics debate on software ownership protection by examining the ontological, methodological, and ethical problems related to property rights infringement that should come prior to any legal discussion. The ontological problem consists in determining precisely what it is for a computer program to be a copy of another one, a largely neglected problem in computer ethics. The methodological problem is defined as the difficulty of deciding whether a given software system is a copy of another system. And the ethical problem corresponds to establishing when a copy constitutes, or does not constitute, a property rights infringement. The ontological problem is solved on the logical analysis of abstract machines, and the latter are argued to be the appropriate level of abstraction for software at which the methodological and the ethical problems can be successfully addressed.
Intellectual Property in the Biotechnological Era
The biotechnological era is upon us. We are living through a time when our very definitions of 'life,' 'nature,' and what it means to be human are being challenged, questioned and redefined. Intellectual property has played a major role in setting this stage, in creating the conditions of possibility as it were. In broad strokes, we can see that the advent of Intellectual Property as both a legal and cultural phenomenon in the world has shaped the way we understand innovation, private property and public goods in foundational ways. Beginning in the West, the practice of protecting intellectual property for private gain has spread worldwide as a result of globalization. Pockets of resistance remain and contested cases are always being heard that push or contract the rules in different directions. The collusion of neoliberal ideologies, globalization and the 'information society' have created a perfect storm where intellectual property can flourish. The complexity of the current global situation means that it is important to resist the temptation to isolate the 'nation-state' as the sole source of this situation. As Debbie Halbert explains in The State of Copyright: