From 2010.igem.org

Introduction

During the development of a project is very common to forget about the availability and the legal and patent issues involved in the use of an determined partm this is was our team has to de , al this year cause many of the sequences we need to work, fortunally we redesign our parts and we were able to sintesize them, but leads us to think this year survey about patents and how can affect our work, also if there are flaws on current laws and how we can improve the sharing of the knowlegdge without compromising security, ethical, and legal topics.

Now on this year, the BioBrick Foundation released a draft of a document that allows to explore a way to share and also protect the intellectual properties, this document is called Public Agreement (BPA), even its on it alpha version, is a nice approach about the issues on patents and their use on BioBricks, and a document we belive should be known by almost any iGEM participant to be enhanced to our purpouse

To do a full research was outside the scope of this survey but let us know a general perspective around our teams

Survey results

A total of 132 answers were recovered, with almost one answer per team, which lead us to analyze our data and to explore which points about patenting and BPA are know among the teams participating, plus adding a personal perspective about what should be.

Basic info

132 answers from 68 teams of 24 countries of member teams answer our survey, which 110 were students, 13 Advisors and 10 where teachers. This means that almost all the range of participants were covered.

Basic Info
What is your role on your team?

Legal Issues

17% were advised about legal issues and 83% where not, during the development 12% encountered issues about their parts a 88% not. From those which found issues 7 get in touch with the owner and 7 not, and the response was mostly good.

Legal Issues found during the development of the projects
Does anybody on your team advises about legal issues on your project?	On the development of your project, had you found legal issues about patents of your parts?
Did you get in touch with the owner of the patent to ask for authorization to use it on iGEM?	How was the response from the owner of the patent?

How to patent

About the consideration of if patents were necesary or not 57% answered Yes and 43% answered not.

On if we know how to patent 66% answered not and 34% yes.

And about if the teams were thinking about patenting parts, methods, etc 13% answered yes and 84% no.

About patent knowledge
Do you consider that patents are necesary?	Do you know how to patent?
Do you plan to patent some of your parts?

BioBrick Public Agreement

When we ask if they knew about the BPA 36% answered Yes and 64% answered not.

36% answered about BPA, which 58% answered that BPA should cover this year biobricks and 42% answer that shouldnt.

BioBrick Public Agreement
Do you consider that this year BioBricks should be protected with the BPA?	Do you know about the BPA?

Download the results
XLS File	PDF File