The Innovation Emancipator
By Peter LloydSetting off on the premise that patents lock up rather than spread innovation, the Global Innovation Commons aims to reduce the abuse. To do so, they have created a website that makes patented technology available to people in places where it is not protected by its patents.
According to the Global Innovation Commons, “For the past 30 years, patents have been abused. Rather than serving the public’s expansion of knowledge, they’ve been used as business and legal weapons.” A drug company, for example, might prevent a life-saving treatment from the market in order to maintain the certain flow of profit an already established drug currently brings.
Such an example might raise the question, Why do we continue to rely so heavily on pollution-spewing vehicles and power plants so long after learning how they harm us? Obviously the internal combustion engine not only profits auto manufacturers but also many other associated industries, including the oil industry. Introducing too quickly a revolutionary innovation such as electric vehicles could bring devastating economic effects. When the same people who make cars control the patents for electric motors, batteries, and other green innovations, they can ensure a more orderly and profitable transition.
But that kind of innovation bondage is exactly what patents were meant to prevent. Introduced as early as 500 BC in ancient Greece, patents promised to encourage creativity, invention, and innovation by giving their holders exclusive right to the fruit their creative labors. As spelled out in the US Constitution, the ideas was, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
In the video below, Dr. David Martin of the Global Innovation Commons claims that patent abuse has delivered the opposite result. That only three-percent of some 56-million patents are in use. Many patents, he says, “fence in” creative works in order to prevent their implementation. He specifically accuses BP of patenting solar technology to protect its lucrative practice of pumping oil out of the ground.
In response, the Global Innovation Commons, offers the world a database of patents cataloged according to where they are not protected. Namely, Africa and some of the Middle East. They are also grouped under the significant human challenges of agriculture, clean energy, water, and world health. Martin presents a more colorful and passionate case for the commons.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.