La industria farmacéutica defiende la necesidad de la existencia derechos de propiedad intelectual, en forma de patentes, muy fuertes para poder rentabilizar su inversión en investigación, de modo que puedan continuar desarrollando nuevos fármacos. Esta idea está siendo contestada con propuestas y evidencias que muestran que los modelos open source pueden generara mayor innovación. Un reciente artículo (Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons Hypothesis, NBER Working Paper No. 11465, July 2005) recoge los resultados de la investigación de dos economistas estadounidenses Fiona Murray y Scott Stern, que demuestran que las patentes en realidad reducen el flujo del conocimiento científico biomédico y por tanto podrían ser una barrera para la innovación.
La aproximación al problema de estos autores se basa en la comparación de las citas recibidas por artículos científicos que han dado lugar a patentes y otros equivalentes que no han originado patentes. El efecto negativo es de entre el 9 y el 17%, modesto en palabras de los autores pero muy relevante dado que señala que el efecto de las patentes va en sentido opuesto al defendido habitualmente. Por supuesto, la reducción en la transferencia de conocimiento no significa necesariamente una menor innovación en nuevos productos, pero todo apunta a que esta relación es más que probable.
Este es el resumen del artículo:
While the potential for intellectual property rights to inhibit the diffusion of scientific knowledge is at the heart of several contemporary policy debates, evidence for the “anti-commons effect” has been anecdotal. A central issue in this debate is how intellectual property rights over a given piece of knowledge affects the propensity of future researchers to build upon that knowledge in their own scientific research activities. This article frames this debate around the concept of dual knowledge, in which a single discovery may contribute to both scientific research and useful commercial applications. A key implication of dual knowledge is that it may be simultaneously instantiated as a scientific research article and as a patent. Such patent-paper pairs are at the heart of our empirical strategy. We exploit the fact that patents are granted with a substantial lag, often many years after the knowledge is initially disclosed through paper publication. The knowledge associated with a patent paper pair therefore diffuses within two distinct intellectual property environments – one associated with the pre-grant period and another after formal IP rights are granted. Relative to the expected citation pattern for publications with a given quality level, anticommons theory predicts that the citation rate to a scientific publication should fall after formal IP rights associated with that publication are granted. Employing a differences-indifferences estimator for 169 patent-paper pairs (and including a control group of publications from the same journal for which no patent is granted), we find evidence for a modest anti-commons effect (the citation rate after the patent grant declines by between 9 and 17%). This decline becomes more pronounced with the number of years elapsed since the date of the patent grant, and is particularly salient for articles authored by researchers with public sector affiliations.
Este trabajo confirma la existencia de una tragedia de los anticomunes en la investigación biomédica, tal como propuesieron en Science en 1998 Michael A. Heller y Rebecca S. Eisenberg (Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research, Science 280:698-701):
The "tragedy of the commons" metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development. Otherwise, more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer useful products for improving human health.
