Team:Hong Kong HKUST/HP Intellectual Property Rights Learning
Intellectual Property Rights
As everyone knows, intellectual property rights are ultimately important in modern society due to its function to promote creativity and protect the owners from plagiarism. Almost every country and region would try their best to fight against plagiarism and promote the intellectual property rights among themselves. Being a renowned worldwide competition, iGEM also emphasises the significance of the intellectual property rights. After some investigation, it was found that patent was still applicable in iGEM related products by fulfilling certain requirements. It is believed that intellectual property rights would indirectly affect the prospect of the synthetic biology.
The tri-stable switch has previously been worked on by Brown University iGEM team in 2006 and 2007. Although the team did not complete their circuit construction, the idea was originally theirs. Hence, we ventured on an investigation based on articles and interviews with experts regarding academic originality. Some sources mentioned that our team is able to patent the invention as long as nobody has previously filed a patent application. Moreover, some patents are only applicable in the scope of a specific area, depending on the country in which the invention has been filed. We therefore might be able to patent tri-stable switch since Brown University is located in different country. Nonetheless, the idea has long been published on their iGEM wiki page - a public domain, resulting the invention to lose its novelty.
Although the tri-stable switch is non-patentable, we can still patent the application of tri-stable switch as long as we have not uploaded or shared our application to a public domain. We however think that it is too early to do so as we have yet refined the complete designs for our application. Tri-stable switch has various applications, and beneficial functions are not just limited to biosensing. People can therefore develop tri-stable switch accordingly and claim rights when an appropriate application has been established.
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