Alternative Energy/The Next Climate Deal
Garthwaite, J., 2009c - The article discusses the advent of the Innovation, Development and Deployment Alliance (IDEA) in response to the proposed addition of a compulsory licensing clause in the UNFCCC post Kyoto regime to be discussed in Copenhagen in December 2009. Members of IDEA include large companies with strong patent portfolios like GE and Microsoft, and they oppose the compulsory licensing proposal based on the potential for lost profits from their patented technologies. Two sources in the article - a venture capitalist and a lawyer - opine that compulsory licenses are unlikely to have any affect on the deployment of critical carbon-mitigation technologies in developing countries due to bigger economic and infrastructure barriers in these countries. They believe that these issues will trump the patent barrier issue and compulsory licensing will not create the desired increase in technology transfer to developing countries. While the model of compulsory licensing is borrowed from the biotech industry where critical drugs for public health can be licensed at low cost to developing countries, the article points out that it is unlikely that the policy will have the same affect with clean technology. This is due to the fact that pharmaceuticals are expensive to develop, but rather cheap to reproduce and distribute, meaning the profit on the drug sales can be quite high. Clean technologies on the other hand are expensive to develop and very expensive to reproduce, and the market has a high number of competing products that undercut that price and limit the profitability of the technology.