What are the advantages and disadvantages of patenting science? Can patenting be dangerous for science? Your opinion?
The modern world is defined only by one thing-economics. Patenting has become absolutely important.
It is an unfortunate situation, but as Apurva Kumar says, patenting is important. It is a far from perfect system and many will argue that it is very ineffective. Patenting only really works if the inventor has access to (or enough financial resources to fund) legal action if the patent is infringed upon. Together with excessive patent costs and the fact that some major countries ignore international patent law means that it is only really effective for larger companies or very very determined individuals.
Good question. Some good and precious things have to be protected, and some have to be shared; because it is good for everyone. Personally I prefer the latter view point. It is up to the inventor / innovator to decide to patent the work or product; but in these days when knowledge is abounding, another scientist may come along and produce something similar or even better!
IMHO this question addresses to 'open science' and 'open innovation' topics. If we regard some R&D outcome as a public good, there should be minor or no restrictions to access this knowledge. But usually most inventions are property of researchers or institutions, so the owners can do whatever they want. If a government treats some invention as a priority public good, it tries to fund the research or to buy out the results for open access. Therefore, in a market economy your question should be addressed to governments and policy makers and rearranged like this:
- what are the priority areas in which governments support open science and open innovation?
- what do they do to select and to support such activities and to make the results open?
I exactly do not understand the context to use term 'science' in this question. So far according to my knowledge, Its inventions that gets patent, not discoveries (in your word science, if I am not mistaken). A patentee claims benefits on accounts of innovation and intellectual contribution he has invested in an invention. So whats wrong with it?
No. Commercial interest of businessman works against the common man's interest. Business firms are fast converting basic rights to needs! It has strong future repercussions for society!
Patenting is not dangerous to Science unless and until it will not affect on basic laws of nature and also human ethics. In my view it increases and influences the researchers to engage in further research by getting value (patent protection) for their earlier research through patenting their invention.
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