Jerome H. Reichman

A Manifesto concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs

character, they would likely be regarded as unprotectable by copyright law. 51 1.4 Programs Are Industrial Compilations of Applied Know-How 1.4.1 Program Construction Requires Selection and Arrangement of

International public goods and transfer of technology under a globalized intellectual property regime

Part I. International Provision of Public Goods under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime Part II. Innovation and Technology Transfer in a Protectionist Environment Part III. Sectoral Issues Part IV. Reform and Regulation Issues.

Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries?: Lessons From the US Experience

The US Bayh-Dole Act encourages university patenting of inventions arising from publicly funded research. Lessons from three decades of US experience serve as a cautionary tale for those countries that may choose to emulate Bayh-Dole.

Compulsory Licensing of Patented Pharmaceutical Inventions: Evaluating the Options

In this Comment, the author traces the relevant legislative history pertaining to compulsory licensing of patented pharmaceuticals from the TRIPS Agreement of 1994 to the 2003 waiver to, and later proposed amendment of, article 31, which enables poor countries to obtain needed medicines from other countries that possess manufacturing capacity. The Comment then evaluates recent, controversial uses of the relevant legislative machinery as viewed from different critical perspectives. The Comment shows how developing countries seeking access to essential medicines can collaborate in ways that would avoid undermining incentives to innovation and other social costs attributed to compulsory licensing. It ends by defending the legality of recent measures taken to promote public health in developing countries, and by reminding developed countries that unilateral retaliation against such measures is demonstratably illegal under WTO foundational law and jurisprudence.

Pathways Across the Valley of Death: Novel Intellectual Property Strategies for Accelerated Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is stagnating. Government agencies, industry analysts, and industry scientists have all noted that, despite significant increases in pharmaceutical R&D funding, the production of fundamentally new drugs - particularly drugs that work on new biological pathways and proteins - remains disappointingly low. To some extent, pharmaceutical firms are already embracing the prescription of new, more collaborative R&D organizational models suggested by industry analysts. In this Article, we build on collaborative strategies that firms are already employing by proposing a novel public-private collaboration that would help move upstream academic research across the valley of death that separates upstream research from downstream drug candidates. By exchanging trade secrecy for contract-based collaboration, our proposal would both protect intellectual property rights and enable many more researchers to search for potential drug candidates.

A new view of intellectual property and software

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM March 1996/Vol. 39, No. 3 21 ach time there appears to be a lull in the controversy about legal protection for software, we are quickly jolted by the battle being joined anew. The difficulties won’t soon disappear, we believe, because there is a deep-seated problem here: existing intellectual property laws are fundamentally ill-suited to software. The problems are rooted in the core assumptions in the law and their mismatch with what we take to be important about software. We believe a durable solution requires a new approach to the problem. We suggest one such approach that is founded on the notion of market preservation, that is, constructing just enough machinery to head off the ways in which marketplaces fail. We outline here how to do this using a law focused on short-term protection against clones and that solves the market failure problem without interfering unduly with the ability to reuse incremental innovation. A more extensive discussion of our ideas is found in [3]. This overview focuses on the technical issues of particular interest to this audience.

The Case for Public Funding and Public Oversight of Clinical Trials

Clinical drug trials are public goods and should be publicly funded to avoid undersupply, the suppression of adverse results and other problems, according to Tracy R. Lewis, Jerome H. Reichman and Anthony D. So.

Saving the patent law from itself: informal remarks concerning the systemic problems afflicting developed intellectual property regimes.

*

Sharing by Design: Data and Decentralized Commons

Overcoming legal and policy obstacles Ambitious international data-sharing initiatives have existed for years in fields such as genomics, earth science, and astronomy. But to realize the promise of widespread sharing of scientific data, intellectual property, data privacy, national security, and other legal and policy obstacles must be overcome (1). Although these issues have attracted much attention in some circles, they have often taken a back seat to addressing technical challenges. Yet failure to account for legal and policy issues at the outset of a large transborder data-sharing project can lead to undue resource expenditures and data-sharing structures that may offer fewer benefits than hoped. Drawing on our experience with the Belmont Forum, a multinational earth change–research program, we propose a framework to help plan data-sharing arrangements with a focus on early-stage decisions including options for legal interoperability.

Overcoming the Impasse on Intellectual Property and Climate Change at the UNFCCC: A Way Forward

Intellectual property rights have traditionally been the primary policy mechanism for encouraging private investments in innovation, including for the production of mitigation and adaptation technologies. Yet while global climate change negotiations have made some progress in the area of technology transfer, as reflected in last year’s agreement in Cancun to establish a Technology Mechanism under the UNFCCC, the role of intellectual property rights has remained a particularly divisive issue. Not only has no agreement been reached in this area, but even the path to a constructive and meaningful discussion seems elusive. Unless the role of intellectual property is addressed in a constructive and balanced manner, the potential for achieving sustainable and realistic outcomes from the climate talks could be compromised. In this policy brief, we seek to untangle the issues that lie behind this impasse. We also suggest a possible course for action that, while taking into account a diversity of perspectives, also challenges countries – and other stakeholders – to go beyond entrenched negotiating positions.