Eve Gray has written another deeply insightful post ‘IP in Publicly Financed Research – does the cure match the disease?’
South Africa, and other developing countries do need to put a stop to the appropriation of South African knowledge. South Africa also urgently needs to create a culture of innovation.
Centralising and scaling up patenting doesn’t meet either of these needs effectively; simply patenting whatever can be patented does not identify what most needs protection, the best protection is often not patenting but some other form of intellectual property such as publishing under an open copyright licence, and patenting does not equal either successful commercialisation nor scientific breakthrough.
