Interdisciplinary Study on Medical Research: Rescuing Intellectual Property Rights in Pandemic Emergencies from "Tragedy of the Anticommon"

粗略：阿伯丁大学法学院及其神户大学法学院和英国国际法和比较法研究所(BIICL)的研究伙伴刚刚获得了一套与COVID相关的研究补助金，价值620,000 GB(850,000美元)。日本科学促进会(JSPS)和英国研究所(UKRI)的资金将相应地授予阿伯丁大学和英国国际法与比较法研究所424,857.38英镑和神户大学29,980,000日元。赠款有效期为三年，从2021年12月到2024年12月。这些资金是为了支持日本科学促进会和英国工研院最近提出的“与日本研究人员共同应对新冠肺炎挑战”的呼吁。该研究项目建议审查如何对私法、商法和知识产权法的各个方面进行改革，以更好地在面对新出现的流行病时做出快速政策反应。特别是，来自法律博弈论的专业知识，如反共有结构，将被用作一种创新的法律研究方法。研究团队包括来自阿伯丁大学、BIICL、神户大学、北海道大学、日本大学和东海大学的法律学者，使其成为近年来最广泛的英日法律研究项目之一。深入：为了解决新的医学问题，如病毒爆发，许多专利、版权和其他商业秘密需要被许多国家的各种研究实验室访问。然而，围绕医疗和药品知识产权(IP)的市场的协调问题可能会阻碍治疗、治疗和疫苗的快速开发，因为大流行的时间框架非常紧凑。这种情况可以用知识产权危机来形容。此外，确保研究程序和产品安全的国家法规和政策往往需要数年时间才能完成。另一方面，政府对知识产权的干预可能会阻碍私营企业投资于未来应对下一次潜在流行病的必要研究。因此，我们的研究试图找到知识产权危机的解决方案，使市场和产权在大流行期间能够继续发挥作用。这项研究将考察危机时期不同法律领域的法律问题，并将以反公地理论的最新创新为理论基础，提出解决方案。反公地是一种现象，当一群单独的当事人对共同或共享的资产拥有排他性权利时，该资产可能变得无法使用，导致整个集团的价值或生产损失。这一现象最初是在物权法中发现的，但在实体法、程序法和行政法的许多领域都可以发现。这可能是医学研究中的一个中心问题，因为涉及的研究人员和研究机构很多。我们将研究知识产权法，以确定控制专利、商标和版权使用的权利可能会导致反常见问题，这些问题可能会阻碍医疗和制药解决方案的快速发展。除了这一学术意义外，本研究还将希望找到知识产权法的替代模式和设计，以便更好地应对紧急事件，防止反共同问题的出现。该项目结合了广泛的法律专业知识来解决这一问题。该研究团队汇集了知识产权法、竞争法、比较私法和商法、非诉讼纠纷解决、国际公法、公法和行政法、国际经济法、法社会学、灾害法和法经济学数学方法等领域的全球专家。

Cursory: A set of COVID-related research grants worth £620,000 (USD $850,000) have just been awarded to the University of Aberdeen's School of Law and its research partners of Kobe University's Graduate School of Law and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law (BIICL). The funds from the Japanese Society for the Progression of Science (JSPS) and the UK Research Institute (UKRI) will award the University of Aberdeen and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law with £424,857.38 and Kobe University with JPY 29,980,000, accordingly. The grants run for three years, from December 2021 till December 2024. The funds are in support of the JSPS and UKRI recent call for 'Addressing COVID-19 Challenges with Japanese Researchers'. The research project proposes to examine how aspects of private law, commercial law, and intellectual property law might be reformed to better enable a rapid policy response in the face of an emerging pandemic. In particular, expertise from legal game theory, such as anticommons structures, will be used as an innovative legal research methodology. The research team includes legal scholars from the University of Aberdeen, BIICL, Kobe University, Hokkaido University, Nihon University, and Tokai University, making this one of the broadest UK-Japan legal research projects in recent history. In Depth: To solve new medical problems, such as viral outbreaks, many patents, copyrights, and other trade secrets need to be accessible to a variety of research labs in many countries. However, coordination problems in the markets surrounding medical and pharmaceutical intellectual property (IP) rights could prevent the rapid development of treatments, cures, and vaccines during the tightly packed timeframes of a moving pandemic. This situation can be described as an IP crisis. In addition, state regulations and policies to ensure safe research procedures and products often take years to complete. On the other hand, governmental interventions to IP rights may dis-incentivise private firms from investing in the necessary research in the future for the next potential pandemic. Thus, our research seeks to find solutions to the IP crisis that enable the continued functional trust of the market and of property rights during pandemics. This research will examine legal issues in various legal areas in such periods of crisis and will propose solutions, using recent innovations in anti-commons theory as theoretical foundations. Anti- commons is a phenomenon when a cluster of separate parties hold exclusionary rights over a joint or shared asset, then that asset might become unusable, resulting in a loss of value or production to the group as a whole. The phenomenon was initially identified in property law, but it can be found arising from many areas of substantive, procedural, and administrative law. This is potentially a central problem in medical research given the large numbers of researchers and research institutes involved. We will investigate intellectual property law, to identify how the rights to control the use of patents, trademarks, and copyrights might cause anti-common problems that can prevent the rapid development of medical and pharmaceutical solutions. In addition to this academic significance, this research will hope to find alternative modalities and designs of intellectual property law that might be more responsive to emergency events and prevent the emergence of anti-common problems. This project combines a wide set of legal expertise to address the problem. The research team unites global experts in Intellectual Property Law, Competition Law, Comparative Private and Commercial Law, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Public International Law, Public Law and Administrative Law, International Economic Law, Sociology of Law, Disaster Law, and Mathematical Methods of Law and Economics.