Responsible intellectual property rights? Untangling open-source biotech adherence to intellectual property rights through DIYbio

Abstract

Deemed as an antidote to the anti-commons crisis in biotechnosciences, biological open-source casts an imaginary of a new, open, and egalitarian biotechnological era for research and innovation. Even though seminal studies have explored the multidirectional attempts of the leading institutional effort on open-source biology, namely synthetic biology, to navigate the intellectual property (IP) regime, the question of how open-source biotech communities actually see and conceive IP system remains open. I propose to contribute to the understanding of how open-source biotechnology dovetails with IP regimes by untangling how enthusiasts of Do-It-Yourself biology (DIYbio) network relate to the IP system and patent rights. Grounded in science studies, and drawing particularly on scholarship on computer hacking and biotechnologies, I report on a discourse analysis of twenty-five semi-structured interviews with members of DIYbio, mostly located in Canada. The concept of responsible IP rights is introduced as a heuristic tool to account for interviewees' complex and multilayered relationship to the IP regime. This relationship, which can be described as a critical adherence, appears to be empirically grounded on three main discursive categories: patents rights as a dysfunctional imperative, for innovation's sake, and making is owning. Through these categories, the interviewees express their compliance with the enforcement of IP rights when needed (market protection) or desired (individual choices), while committing to an open-source approach to biotechnological innovation, which requires the free circulation of enabling resources. The conclusion suggests that such conception of IP rights is built on an idealization of IP regime as a dual-use device, in analogy to dual-use technologies.