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Will “blocking patents” delay nanotech advances, as has happened with biotechmedical advances? Can Open source methodology, with its promise of spreading benefits through new varieties of intellectual property, and which has played a major role in software development, also play a role in nanotech development? At least one MIT researcher, Stephen Steiner, thinks so. He is working on a web site for “open source nanotech”. Among other [...] Those of you who subscribe to Foresight’s free Weekly News Digest (sign up using the Join Email List box at upper right of our home page) have seen that practically every week there’s new positive results to report on nanotechnology for drug delivery, especially for cancer. A summary of where to read about these [...] Registration for Foresight’s Nov. 3-4 Vision Weekend focused on nanotechnology and other advanced technologies — traditionally restricted to Foresight Senior Associates — is being opened to the general public this year as an experiment. Space is limited and participants are advised to register very soon. There’s an arms race between government patent offices and patent filers assisted by private law firms. The folks who work for the former get paid a lot less than the those who work for the latter. This leads to a continual drain away from government review of patent applications toward private generation of [...] At one of the Accelerating Change conferences I saw Prof. Beth Noveck introduce for the first time her ideas on improving patents via peer review. Now, the nanotechnology field will be envious to hear that another field has been chosen to carry out the first pilot project — software, as reported in IEEE Spectrum: Today’s San Jose Mercury News — the newspaper of Silicon Valley — features a guest editorial by Wirt Cook, IBM vice president and senior state executive, on the proposed Patent Reform Act, titled “Patent Reform Act best way to protect, foster innovation”: The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 in the U.S. gives patent rights for federally-funded research done in universities to the universities themselves, in effect. Many people regard this strategy as a succcess, and many countries around the world are copying it. But is this the best way to handle this publicly-funded intellectual property? [...] Small Times reports on a meeting held in Oregon among a wide variety of nanotechnology-based business participants, at which many commercialization challenges were discussed. One was difficulties encountered with the U.S. Patent office: Richard Jones and commenters bring our attention to a number of enticing research papers on the use of catalysis and molecular motors to produce movement. One paper mentioned sounds particularly useful: an overview of progress on Synthetic Molecular Motors and Mechanical Machines. From the abstract: John Walker brings to our attention an apparently distressing set of concerns regarding the new version of Windows, known as Vista, written up by Peter Gutman as A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. Excerpts: NYU prof Nadrian Seeman, who won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize back in 1995, has done it again. From Science Daily: A story by Jon Van describes the growing backlog of nanotechnology patent applications: First, the good news. Here’s an update from Physorg.com on the nanoactuator work reported previously. Not much new technical info, but new thoughts on cool applications: Roger Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, is a leader in open source biotech: Patrick Lin over at the Nanoethics Group let us know that the principals of that group have received a US$250,000 grant from the NSF to study the ethics of using nanotechnology to do human enhancement, through their academic affiliations at Dartmouth and Western Michigan U. We don’t usually like to link to subscription sites, but as an editorial advisory board member, I’ll make an exception for Nanotech Briefs (you can download a free sample). The August issue has the usual hard-core technical news: SiGe transistor operates at frequencies above 500 GHz, Method creates hollow nanocrystals, nanopore technique sequences DNA [...] From Newswire Today: Raj Bawa, a former patent examiner and now biotech consultant and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, writes in the journal Nanomedicine on his concerns about the growing nanotech “patent thicket” and its negative impact on innovation: From the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via ag-IP-News: a “Nanotechnology Customer Partnership meeting will be held on March 28, 2006 in the Madison Auditorium, North Side, located at 600 Dulany Street, in Alexandria, Virginia. This Nanotechnology Customer Partnership initiative is designed and developed to be a forum to share ideas, experiences, and insights [...] In the U.S., patent rights from federally-funded grants to university researchers generally go to the universities. Sometimes, the research professors benefit personally, depending on the school. This situation results from the Bahy-Dole Act of 1980. Most observers regard this act as an improvement over what came before, but it’s not clear that [...] |
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