Blogging Biodiversity

I returned from the ‘Patenting Lives’ conference and my trip to London on Sunday. The conference was small – about 50 participants – but the quality of presentations and discussions was very high.

After an introduction from Johanna Gibson, the project director, the conference began with a presentation from Tony Howard, the Deputy Director of the UK Patent Office. His presentation was on the ‘Legal Framework for Patents for Living Materials’ and was, in essence, an overview of the UK principles and standards of patent law.

The first panel was on human rights and included an eclectic mix of speakers including myself. The first speaker was me and my presentation was on ‘Life as Chemistry or Life as Biology? An Ethic of Patents on Genetically Modified Organisms’. I presented an ethical framework for examining patents on life forms. The framework is a series of antonyms: autonomy vs. control, uniqueness vs. fungibility, and sanctity vs. violability, and I argue that autonomy, uniqueness and sanctity should be our ethical position. I then looked at the progression of US and Canadian case law concerning patent law and living organisms and concluded that by conceiving organisms as chemistry rather than as biology, the patenting of life forms contravenes the ethical framework. I don’t really feel in a position to comment on the presentation – I’ll leave that to others. I can say that in the discussion that followed, not everyone agreed with my arguments but that’s what keeps things interesting. There did seem to be agreement that while controversial, it is important and necessary to discuss these sorts of ethical issues. I’ll try to post my paper and slides from the presentation but, ironically enough, may have to sort out some copyright issues first.

The next speaker was Father Loyd Brendan P Norella who discussed Raelians and cloning in the Philippines. The most interesting point to me was that while many religions are opposed to cloning, the Raelians actually support cloning on a religious basis. This means that the presumption that sometimes exist that taking religious views into account in the cloning debate will automatically mean an opposition to cloning does not always hold true. The final presenter on the panel was Adejoke Oyewunmi who discussed the right to development and the patenting of living organisms in an African context. One of her main points was that because African countries have opted to develop their own sui generis systems that balance private intellectual property rights with other interests such as farmers’ rights, traditional knowledge, etc., they are more likely to support the right to development than is something like TRIPS.

The second panel was on development and innovation. Sangeeta Udgaonkar spoke about ‘The Patenting of Life and the Legal Response in India’. This included an overview of some of the biopiracy controversies in India such as the one surrounding the US patent on turmeric and subsequent amendments to Indian legislation to implement TRIPS and to try and guard against misappropriation of traditional knowledge. According to Sangeeta, this work has resulted in greater connections among the Indian IP offices, agriculture and environment ministries which previously operated largely independently. Edson Beas Rodrigues Jr. spoke next on the relationship among biodiversity, intellectual property rights and biotechnology in Brazil. He pointed out that while Brazil was quick to implement the TRIPS Agreement in 1994, the country was much slower in ratifying and implementing the CBD despite having some of the highest levels of biodiversity in the world.

The topic for the first panel after lunch was public goods and public interest. Ashish Gosain spoke on ‘Public Domain, Public Goods, Public Interest’. Next, Chris Hamilton did a sort of deconstruction of biopiracy and the language of biopiracy. He stated that Pat Mooney coined the term ‘biopiracy’ in direct response to World Resources Institute book on bioprospecting from the early 1990s – the first book on the subject. He also found that the biopiracy rhetoric is based on deliberate and productive simplifications of science and IPRs that plays on common misconceptions of these domains. This latter point was somewhat reassuring for me as I sometimes find the talk by activists that glosses over the subtleties of these issues offends my anal retentive legal sensibilities!

In the Q&A session that followed the panel, there was some discussion of the double use of the word ‘piracy’ in the biodiversity realm versus in copyright. According to Jeremy deBeer, the Recording Industry Association of America is moving away from the piracy metaphor in recognition of the dilution of its impact and is now turning to disease metaphors.

Jeremy was also the first to speak in the next panel on agriculture. He presented a very interesting analysis of both the rights and responsibilities of GMO patent owners based on recent Canadian case law. In the Schmeiser decision, the Supreme Court largely overlooked whether there were other rights at stake, i.e. Schmeiser’s rights as a property owner vs. Monsanto’s rights as the owner/holder of the patent. More recently, in the Hoffman decision from Saskatchewan, the court dismissed any responsibilities that Monsanto and Aventis might have from releasing GM canola into the environment. Diwakar Poudel presented his field research on the willingness of Nepalese farmers to pay for the conservation of agrobiodiversity. The outcomes were very interesting although the slides sometimes went faster than my slow interpretation of statistics. One point was that the perceived threat of extinction of a variety did not influence willingness to pay for its conservation. The final presentation of the day was by Dwijen Rangnekar on ‘Implementing Article 27.3(b): What Have we Learned from the Economists?’ Much of his discussion focused on the sui generis protection of plant varieties and UPOV.

Summary of Day 2 to follow shortly…

Posted on December 5th, 2005 under Intellectual property •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback