Chronicle Article: Creative Commons for Patents

[Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu>]

This article was recommended by several liblicense-l readers.  It can be 
found in the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2004, and:
<http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i06/06a03301.htm>

Worth a detour.  

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Who Should Own Science?

A group proposing alternative licenses says patents thwart research; some
officials disagree

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Creative Commons is a group that developed an alternative copyright system
to make literature, music, films, and scholarship freely available to the
public. Now it plans to do the same for scientific and technological
research.

The new project, called Science Commons, will encourage universities to
voluntarily forgo some of the protections of patent and trade-secret laws
in order to make scientific research more accessible to other
universities, researchers, and the public through an alternative licensing
scheme.

One goal of Science Commons is to provide standard licenses on its Web
site that universities can use to govern the distribution of their
inventions. The idea follows the model of Creative Commons, which features
several alternative copyright licenses on its Web site.

Creative Commons draws its inspiration from the open-source-software
movement, whose objective is to make software free so that anyone can
improve the programs. Creative Commons and its new counterpart were
founded by Lawrence Lessig, a cyberlaw expert and professor at the
Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, and other experts on
law and technology.

These developers say scientific progress is often stymied by universities
and companies who hold on to research, preventing other scientists from
gaining access to it. The developers are critical of the Bayh-Dole Act, a
federal law adopted in 1980 that encourages the commercialization of
inventions developed with federal money, and of efforts in Congress to
give database publishers legal control over the information they collect.

[MANY PARAGRAPHS DELETED]

Copyright, Chronicle of Higher Education 2004

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