Proposals for the Introduction of Certificates of Authorship instead of Patents for Methods of Diagnosis and Treatment

Abstract

Recent years have shown reasonable support (including by the author of the article) for proposals to exclude methods for diagnosing and treating people and animals from the list of results of intellectual activity in respect of which patent protection can be applied in the scientific legal literature. These proposals are based on the provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), foreign experience of countries with developed legal systems and arguments about the practical inexpediency of patenting these results of intellectual activity, as well as on the moral and ethical side of the issue. In the case of legislative support for these initiatives, in order to preserve the encouragement of innovation and reflect the contribution of developers to medical science in the field of creating new and developing existing methods of diagnosis and treatment, the paper proposes to refer to the experience of the USSR in issuing copyright certificates for this type of invention and to revive such legal mechanisms in the Russian legal system.