Prospect Patents, Data Markets and the Commons in Data Driven Medicine. Openness and the Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights

Scholars who point to political influences and the regulatory function of patent courts in the U.S. have long questioned the courts’ subjective interpretation of what ‘things’ can be claimed as inventions. The present article sheds light on a different but related facet: the role of the courts in regulating knowledge production. I argue that the recent cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit, which made diagnostics and software very difficult to patent and which attracted criticism for a wealth of different reasons, are fine case studies of the current debate over the proper role of the state in regulating the marketplace and knowledge production in the emerging information economy. The article explains that these patents are prospect patents that may be used by a monopolist to collect data that everybody else needs in order to compete effectively. As such, they raise familiar concerns about failure of coordination emerging as a result of a monopolist controlling a resource such as datasets that others need and cannot replicate. In effect, the courts regulated the market, primarily focusing on ensuring the free flow of data in the emerging marketplace very much in the spirit of the ‘free the data’ language in various policy initiatives, yet at the same time with an eye to boost downstream innovation. In doing so, these decisions essentially endorse practices of personal information processing which constitute a new type of public domain: a source of raw materials which are there for the taking and which have become most important inputs to commercial activity. From this vantage point of view, the legal interpretation of the private and the shared legitimizes a model of data extraction from individuals, the raw material of information capitalism, that will fuel the next generation of data intensive therapeutics in the field of data driven medicine.