[okfn-discuss] Businesses unwilling to share data, but keen on government doing it

Fri Jul 2 13:19:50 UTC 2010

Peter,

The whole logic of the way pharma is organized makes closed data and
the associated immense waste absolutely unavoidable.

As you indicate, the allocation of patents (and therefore all the
revenue stream) is often a matter of winner-takes-all sheer luck.
While one company strikes lucky and makes pure profit, another might
invest years of work and never get any compensation.

As I understand it, the purpose of patenting was not to protect the
lucky inventor, it was to protect the investment and large scale
manufacturing of plant.  It's the guaranteed market monopoly against
which you raise the capital to build the factories.

If every patent was automatically put up for auction, rather than
being the sole property of the discoverer (as is the case of oil finds
-- if you find it on your land, it's not yours), these manufacturing
monopolies could more rationally be formed, and the money raised would
easily fund in a predictable way the basic research into new drugs.
And open data would become possible.

Julian.

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 12:52 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 12:15 AM, Julian Todd <julian at goatchurch.org.uk>
> wrote:
>>
>> I've discovered that in the oil and gas sector, essentially all the
>> data is open and public.  No one conceals that they have found a
>> productive well or how much was there.  Have a look round the data
>> available from Norway
>>    http://www.npd.no/en/news/Exploration-drilling-results/
>>
>> There's equivalent UK data, but it's much less structured.  Drilling
>> holes is expensive enough that the industry cannot afford to waste
>> time not using the very best data -- even if it does mean larger
>> companies can't dump on smaller companies by withholding useful data
>> from them.
>
> This is useful material for us to show the value of collaboration - perhaps
> we should keep an adhoc set of stories
>>
>> I'd draw a very close analogy between oil exploration and
>> pharmaceuticals -- no one knows exactly where all the oil fields are,
>> just as no one knows which chemicals work as effective drugs.  There's
>> a large element of detective work, derived from the experimental data
>> (the more the better).  They bid for the rights to exploit the fields.
>>
>> The reason why the pharmaceutical industry can get away with their
>> structure of waste is they can afford it and defend it.  No one can
>> challenge it, because there is no common space.  Every pharmaceutical
>> company could be assigning its 100 research scientists into the same
>> dry area while avoiding completely wide open untapped sectors, but you
>> can't make it visible in the way you can with oil rigs on a map.
>
> I think there are objective differences. The primary  IP in pharma is
> patenting a lead compound and the compounds round it. I've been in areas
> where the competition has beaten us by a week to file the patent. And one
> public disclosure of any compound can invalidate the patent. So I'm more
> sympathetic to defending secrecy on the primary invention - but not on the
> background knowledge
>>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
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