Submitted by Dr Frank Tietze on Mon, 05/10/2020 - 21:54
Voluntary pledges to make intellectual property broadly available to address urgent public health crises can overcome administrative and legal hurdles faced by more elaborate legal arrangements such as patent pools and achieve greater acceptance than governmental compulsory licensing.
In our Nature Biotech article (38, pages1146–1149, 2020) we contrast the role of patent pledges, patent pools and compulsory licensing approaches to end the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper is co-authored with colleagues who are jointly involved in the Open Covid Pledge, such as Jorge L. Contreras (S.J. Quinney College of Law and Department of Human Genetics, University of Utah), Michael Eisen (Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California Berkeley, Berkeley), Ariel Ganz (Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford), Mark Lemley (Stanford Law School, Stanford), Jenny Molloy (University of Cambridge) and Diane M. Peters (Creative Commons).
The work with the Open Covid Pledge is related to research in our IIPM Lab led by Jonas Ehrnsperger to categorise types of pledges (see Ehrnsperger, J. F. and F. Tietze (2019). "Patent pledges, open IP, or patent pools? Developing taxonomies in the thicket of terminologies." Plos One 14(8): e0221411), understand the motives behind patent pledges, such as to faciliate technology diffusion (see Ehrnsperger, J. F. and F. Tietze (2019). Motives for Patent Pledges: A Qualitative Study. CTM working paper series. University of Cambridge, UK.) and our Covid-19 related projects (eg. Tietze, F., P. Vimalnath, L. Aristodemou and J. Molloy (2020). "Crisis-Critical Intellectual Property: Findings from the COVID-19 Pandemic." IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management).
