By: Declan Butler
Send to a friend
The details you provide on this page will not be used to send unsolicited email, and will not be sold to a 3rd party. See privacy policy.
A group of leading scientists and economists is urging the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva, Switzerland, to promote ‘open’ models of innovation that do not rely on patents.
In a 7 July letter to WIPO director-general Kamil Idris, 59 individuals call on the organisation to hold a major conference in 2004 to consider the recent “explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods”, including the Human Genome Project and the open-source software movement.
The group believes that innovation based on freely available knowledge can be effective not just in areas where it has established a foothold – such as genome sequence data – but also in sectors where patent protection is entirely dominant, such as drug development.
Reference: Nature 424, 118 (2003)