Yesterday, I attended Dr Jackson’ class ESCI 8990 Daily Page.
We discussed questions:
- whether scientific knowledge is a private product?
- whether is it right to use grants to apply patent or develop products for profits?
- conflicts between patent protection and equal access to scientific knowledge.
I didn’t say a word because I was the only Chinese around the table and intellectual property protection in China has a bad reputation although the situation is improving. I don’t want to defend too much, but I guess everyone may only have one story about the IPP in China. But just as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said: There is a danger of a single story. So it will always be good to know more than one story.
The idea of patent protection became popular in industry culture. In order to encourage people and companies to develop more new type of products for society goodness, we give them such protects and advantages in using the patent that they invented first.
But, in agricultural civilization, such as accent China, there is no such idea. Some people may keep their special way of making food or drinks as their secrets, but once the secrets were known by others, they can also make the same food and drinks, and it is legal. The government may also help to publish and transmit some technologies, such as paper making and the printing. If they apply for the patent of making paper and printing, how much money they can earn? But this may also slow down the development of human society. So every patent has limited period for protection. The patent finally becomes common property of human society.
In agricultural civilization, labor is the main value source of a product. Yes, patent tell how to make a product, but it is the labor make it realized. This is not true in industrial civilization, the people or company who possess the patent earn the most of the profit. You will never know how cheap labor become in China nowadays. Is it equal? Is it a new kind of colonization? Many developed country put their factories into developing countries, they use their labor, resources and make wastes and pollution. Is it fair? Is it sustainable? Will it leads to wars? You can read more about Ecojustice.
Well, industrialization and consumerism are both come from western culture. Human rights is also declared in the western. But there is conflicts between commercialization of science and education equity. The following paragraph is from:The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Poor people receive poor education and they remain poor, becomes a circle. This will only lead to hate and war. Patent protection can help develop new products and technologies and promote the progress of society. It can also benefit some people and groups and hurt the others. Especially, when the researchers use grants(money from citizens) to do research and apply for patents only benefit for a special organization or people. Then it is unfair.
It is also disputable whether something should be a patent. For example, the people invent the product later by his own, will lost all the value of his effort because it would be illegal to for him to use the same way to make product.
The company own the patent seems own a new kind of capital – Intellectual Capitalism. Government tend to protect their patent rights in order to encourage more company to do research and development. But sometimes it will lead to monopolization and the price of their products becomes unreasonable(several times higher than its actual cost). Will government still protect?
With the global industrial production, with consumerism and commercialization, will this new kind of capitalism – Intellectual Capitalism create a new colonial history. Do we want this happen? Or it already happened.
There should be a balance between patent protection and common benefit, between efficiency and fairness, between developed and developing countries, between industrial civilization and agricultural civilization, between human and nature, otherwise we are making troubles and potential dangers for ourselves!
On the other hand, science education sits in an uncomfortable place in this landscape given particular aspects of patenting and property rights imply limited access and thus inequity in knowledge acquisition.iphone
克隆文化
有性繁殖与无性繁殖
