La privatización de la ciencia y el conocimiento. El cercamiento de los bienes comunes. Las patentes en biotecnología: el caso de las secuencias genéticas

Abstract

The privatisation of unsuspected spheres of mankind’s common heritage has become thoroughly accepted in recent years. One of the main tools for opening the way and making such a privatisation legitimate is patents. However, an analysis of these legal instruments comes up against its inter-disciplinary nature. Three different areas come together in patents: economy, legislation and technology. The purport of this work is to construct a bridge between these areas. For this reason, the work is clearly differentiated in two parts. In the first, there is an examination of the notion of information as a public good, and there is an analysis of the concept of property in economy; these constitute the anchors of the exposition of the second part. This latter section addresses patents as legal instruments and expounds the legal requisites necessary for patenting an invention, and the problems encountered in the application of these requisites and principles in biotechnology. The basic message of this work has a twofold dimension. On the one hand, underlining the importance in current times of preserving the characteristics of knowledge as a common property resource; on the other, trying to show the need to extend, in some cases, and eradicate, in others, the perspective which leads to the supposition that all human interaction can be modellised as market interchange.