Originally published on AshokaTech.

One of the many sessions in Hyderabad that I'm really excited about is a discussion on intellectual property with Richard Jefferson of Cambia, John Wilbanks of Science Commons, Phil Weilerstein of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, and Ashoka fellow Bright Simons of mPedigree.

Here's a great interview with Richard Jefferson that ABC TV Australia ran a few months ago. Jefferson explains how Cambia is enabling biotech innovation by rethinking how scientists deal with IP issues. He makes the alluring point that open source - something we often think of as a recent development - has actually existed for millennia, much longer than proprietary technologies.

Jefferson argues that potentially lifesaving biotech developments are now being obstructed by muddy webs of ownership that get in the way of people building on one another's ideas. He uses the example of golden rice: the genetically enhanced food "...has been heralded as a biotech revolution to save children with a Vitamin A deficiency," Jefferson says. "It's a terrific technological contribution and it’s been held back for many years because of intellectual property, regulations, and fear of litigation." Jefferson argues that intellectual property issues hamper biotech development more than technical limitations do.

Jefferson sees the patent system not as a barrier but as one of his most important allies. In this interview, Jefferson explains that unlike scientific literature, patents have to explain how to recreate an invention. "The patent system is the most powerful, enabling literature in the world," Jefferson says.

He argues that what's needed isn't a major overhaul of patents, but systems for helping inventors, social enterprises, and NGOs understand and contextualize them. The system he describes would also help innovators negotiate with rights-holders to overcome IP barriers, arguably returning patents to their original purpose. Cambia is now making Jefferson's idea a reality with its recently-launched Initiative for Open Innovation.

In this keynote talk (Part 2) at the SPARC Digital Repositories conference, John Wilbanks argues that copyright is now used in science literature in ways in which it was never intended. By design, copyright provisions protect creative expression; they protect the wording of a paper, but not the ideas behind it.

But now, Wilbanks argues, copyright protection is growing in potentially harmful ways. Showing the audience a chemical formula, he says, "This is going to be the same whether you synthesize it or I synthesize it, just like the height of Mount Everest. These are not creative works; they're not intended to be covered by copyright." Wilbanks sees Science Commons as a way of addressing that problem, making it easier for researchers to share ideas with each other by changing the way in which their publications are protected.

I think it's fascinating to see new innovations in how innovators can share and reuse data. Programs like the Initiative for Open Innovation and Science Commons have the potential to actually accelerate the scientific developments they support.