Open Source in Biology: exception or alternative to intellectual property?

Date:: 20 Nov 2009
Time:: 13:00 to 17:00
Location:: Lloyd Hotel Amsterdam

Introduction
Intellectual property rights have been introduced and strengthened in the last decades, including those on source code and genetic code. An important difference between informatics and biology is, however, that shortly after the introduction of intellectual property rights, an alternative became available in informatics. The open source movement has demonstrated since the early eighties that innovation in informatics is possible on the basis of the sharing and the improvement of the source code of software programs and operating systems. A comparable development occurs in biology as a consequence of the tensions between intellectual property and changing conceptions in research about genes, genomes, proteomes, cells and so forth. Increasingly this involves digital information that needs to be shared and modelled in distributed networks. It is in this context that open source appears as an alternative to intellectual property: it is among several exceptions to intellectual property that become necessary when genetic information and genetic modification are involved.

The aim of this seminar is to open for discussion about a different kind of interpretation of open source in biology. Could open source in biology also be about a more desirable alternative? – could it be a counterbalance to the further increase in private control and public regulation of genetic resources that are the crucial for sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation?

The speakers are:

Prof dr. Guido Ruivenkamp (Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit & CTC, Wageningen University)
Prof dr. Jack Kloppenburg (Department of community and environmental sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Dr. Jan Velterop (Concept Web Alliance, Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre)
Prof dr. ir. Steve Hughes (Egenis, University of Exeter)
Dr. Jane Calvert (Innogin, University of Edinburgh)

Programme and more information about registration can be found in the pdf-file below.