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31 March 2020CopyrightSarah Morgan

COVID-19 ‘pledge’ urges rights owners to share IP

In order to remove IP obstacles in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of scientists, lawyers and entrepreneurs have launched an initiative urging companies to free their IP.

The project, “ Open COVID Pledge” was rolled-out yesterday, March 30, and invites IP owners to grant free and temporary licences to use their patent and copyright protected technology to end the pandemic.

“Under normal circumstances, patents and copyright incentivise innovation in the public and private sector,” said the project. “In this unique moment of global crisis, the costs of the exclusivity granted by our patent and copyright system far outweigh the benefits.”

According to the initiative, the risk of infringement liability and the process of negotiating licences will slow down or prevent investments in the research, scaling, and commercialisation of technologies needed to end the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 pandemic and treat those it has affected. It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment,” added the initiative.

Origin story

The group’s website names 11 founding members, including CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna (a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley) and Diane Peters, the general counsel for non-profit Creative Commons.

According to founding member Frank Tietze, lecturer at the department of engineering, innovation and IP management (IIPM) lab at the University of Cambridge, the team has worked tirelessly to draft the pledge and licence agreement, with colleagues from Stanford and Utah taking a lead.

He said: “When we came together as a group of IP experts from around the world we shared surprisingly similar concerns about IP in the COVID-19 pandemic, which had not surfaced very much yet in public debate then.

“IP should not delay the fight against the pandemic and our ideas quickly converged into thinking that a pledge could potentially be an important instrument for the IP community to contribute,  so to avoid organisations holding back innovative efforts to fight the virus.”

Tietze, who was introduced to the initiative by University of Cambridge Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow Jenny Molloy, said he had already begun to think about the role of IP in the pandemic in January, when one of the university’s PhD students, who is resident in China, was diagnosed with COVID-19.

“When it became apparent from the news that the supply of ventilators and personal protective equipment would be bottlenecks for health systems around the world, I saw how the pandemic relates to the research we have done recently on patent pledges, although in other tech sectors, such as automotive and information and communications technology,” he said.

Licences granted under this pledge are non-exclusive, royalty-free, and worldwide. They would extend back to December 1, 2019, and last until one year after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic to have ended.

The open licence can also be used as a template, providing legal language for organisations to adapt to the laws and regulations that govern them.

To raise awareness, the scientists have contacted their universities and selected industrial contacts, said Tietze. They’re also seeking to recruit owners of large and relevant IP portfolios to sign up to the pledge, alongside encouraging international organisations, such as patent offices, to endorse the pledge.

Other initiatives

This is the latest initiative to call for more open IP in the midst of the pandemic. Last week, sister site LSIPR reported that the Costa Rican government has  asked the WHO to establish a voluntary pool to collect IP rights for technologies that are useful for the detection, prevention, control and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Costa Rica, the pool should provide for free access or licensing on “reasonable and affordable terms”, in every member country.

A number of associations and individuals have  backed the proposal, urging the WHO to reach out to member states that are funding biomedical research relevant to the current pandemic immediately, and engage other rights owners as well.

Some companies have already taken the initiative to share their IP.

UK engineering company Smiths Group has made the  IP covering one of its ventilators available to other manufacturers, as part of an industry attempt to tackle the shortage of life-saving equipment. Medtech company Medtronics has also  shared its ventilator design specifications.

And a consortium of life sciences companies—including  Novartis,  Bristol Myers Squibb and  GSK—have  agreed to share their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds with the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, which was launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, research-charity Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard.

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