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Exploring Philosophical Issues in the Patenting of Scientific and Technological Inventions

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Abstract

Thus far, the philosophical study of patenting has primarily focused on sociopolitical, legal, and ethical issues, such as the moral justifiability of patenting living organisms or the nature of (intellectual) property. In addition, however, the theory and practice of patenting entails many important problems that can be fruitfully studied from the perspective of the philosophy of science and technology. The principal aim of this article is to substantiate the latter claim. For this purpose, I first provide a concise review of the main features of the theory and practice of the patenting of scientific and technological inventions. Second, I discuss several philosophical issues implied by these features and explore the possible contributions of the philosophy of science and technology to the clarification, or resolution, of these issues. The seven features discussed are: patents as commercial monopolies on scientific and technological inventions, the contrast between natural and non-natural subject matter, the distinction between inventions and discoveries, the reproducibility of inventions, the question of the sameness of two inventions, the distinction between the invented and the protected object, and the contrast between material objects versus concepts and theories. The article concludes with some observations on the problems and prospects of the philosophical study of the theory and practice of patenting scientific and technological inventions.

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Notes

  1. Since patents are granted for inventions, the term “scientific invention” pertains to those technological products and processes that are brought about in contexts that are usually designated as being “scientific”.

  2. For instance, a search for “patent” in the 99 articles of this journal available in April 2013 results in three hits, but none of these includes a substantial discussion of patenting.

  3. For a parallel program from a history of science perspective, see MacLeod and Radick (2013). These authors argue for a sustained study of the role of intellectual property practices (broadly conceived but including patenting) in the historical development of the sciences.

  4. For an in-depth discussion of the philosophical issues surrounding intellectual property, see Drahos (1996).

  5. In contrast, the so-called material transfer agreements, which may be part of licensing arrangements, do involve the exchange of tangible research materials, that is, tokens of the invention, such as particular chemical compounds or biological cell cultures.

  6. For a differentiated discussion of John Locke’s influential natural rights interpretation of ordinary property and its implications for intellectual property, see Drahos (1996, chap. 3).

  7. See also Parry and Gere (2006, pp. 154–157), who reach the same conclusion for the analogous case of the production of biological artefacts. It is remarkable, though, that these authors do not extend their conclusion (and their advocacy of a “collective custodianship” model) to the case of patenting scientific inventions, which similarly involves a privatized appropriation of collective achievements.

  8. In Robert K. Merton’s own phrasing, the core values of such an ethos are universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism (Merton 1973/1942).

  9. See also Hanson (2007, p. 524), who argues that, in contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of the technological sciences are human-made objects.

  10. For illuminating, though diverging, accounts of the concepts of naturalness and non-naturalness, see Lee (1999), Luper (1999), and Siipi (2008). An important issue is whether naturalness is taken to be an all-or-nothing affair (each entity is either natural or non-natural) or a matter of degree (a particular entity may be more natural, or less natural, than another one).

  11. Additional ontological questions relating to the patenting of genes, in particular concerning the notions of function and information, are discussed in Calvert (2007).

  12. Although I myself disagree with strictly technoscientific or science-as-technology views (see Radder 2011a, b, 2009, pp. 79–87), they do address significant patterns of complicated phenomena, and hence they cannot be refuted by simply stipulating a fundamental distinction between science and technology from a philosophical armchair position.

  13. By focusing on the property dimension of intellectual property, Drahos (1996) overemphasizes the significance of the abstract, protected objects at the expense of the concretely invented objects.

  14. See Shulman (1999, pp. 91–98). In response to opposition, in 2007 this European patent, then owned by Monsanto, was revoked for lack of novelty (thus, remarkably enough, not for its overly broad character; see http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070504/full/news070430-14.html#comments).

  15. For this reason, Wofgang Balzer’s inaccurate usage of such phrases as the patenting of “scientific knowledge” and “non-material ideas and propositions” (Balzer 2003, p. 91 and pp. 97–98) detracts from the valuable parts of his criticism of academic patenting.

  16. For the details of this argument, see Radder (2006, chaps. 9, 10 and 16).

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Acknowledgments

For ongoing general discussion on patenting issues as well as specific comments on this article, I am indebted to Delene Engelbrecht and Henk van den Belt. In addition, several useful suggestions have been provided by the reviewers of this journal and by the members of the research group “Philosophy of science and technology” at VU University Amsterdam.

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    Hans Radder

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Radder, H. Exploring Philosophical Issues in the Patenting of Scientific and Technological Inventions. Philos. Technol. 26, 283–300 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0109-8

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