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Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research

Science
1 May 1998
Vol 280, Issue 5364
pp. 698-701

Abstract

The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons” in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development. Otherwise, more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer useful products for improving human health.

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Supported by the Cook Endowment at the University of Michigan Law School and the Office of Health and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy. We thank I. Cockburn, F. Collins, R. Cook-Deegan, S. Cullen, R. Ellickson, P. Goldstein, D. Hanahan, E. Jordan, K. Paigen, R. Nelson, N. Netanel, E. Posner, H. Varmus, anonymous reviewers for Science, and workshop participants at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and George Washington University law schools for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Published In

Science
Volume 280 | Issue 5364
1 May 1998

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Published in print: 1 May 1998

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Michael A. Heller
The authors are at the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1215, USA. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Rebecca S. Eisenberg
The authors are at the University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1215, USA. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

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