Intellectual Property in Synthetic Biology - Enacted Issues of Sharing and Owning |
2.2 The Synthetic Biology Ownership Regime
The 'Ownership Regime Issue Network' is also derived from a source set consisting of mixed kinds of actors. The source set is not restricted to a specific sphere (blogs, news or scholarly) on the web but is put together by the actors common affiliation to the debate on IP in synthetic biology. The source set therefore consists of actors who more or less explicitly express their partisanship on the issue of patenting in synthetic biology. The actors who most explicitly express their pro-patent partisanship are the three US and UK blogs (1,2,3), which mainly consist of lawyers who have interdisciplinary expert knowledge in the fields of law and engineering and/or biology. In general it has been much more difficult finding pro-patent proponents on the web which reflects the more narrow source set. This difference between the public availability of the two regimes is also telling us something about how the synbio IP issues are presented on the web.
Characteristics of actors;
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2.2.1 Ownership regime co-link network:
2.2.2 Who is in the network and who is linking to who?
As the biggest (recieving most links from network) and most central actor we have BIO (The Biotechnology Industry Organisation), which is both recieving most links from the network and is linking the most to the network. In this network we have a mix of blogs and corporate firms. BIO and different branches of this organisation is clearly placed as the connecting link between a wing of corporates and expert bloggers (mainly lawyers). Non of the corporates link to any of the blogs. Corporations such as Abbot, AstraZeneca, Amgen, Baxter, and Merck only link to domains with .gov suffixes and to BIO. They do not link directly to the blogs but are connected to the blogs through BIO. Other than the governmental or industry institutions linking to each other we have a dense webwork of bloggers interlinking to eachother (and through their webpages to the intellectual property law firms each blogger is connected to). Another interesting observation is that BIO is linking to several blogs (represented by bloggers who are what we would consider 'expert' patent attorneys) but no law firm is represented in the network. Also interesting is it that corporation are not in our source set but are represented in our issue network. They are not linking to the broader network nor taking a clear stance in the controversy, but they are clearly aknowledged by the ownership network.
From the Urls or hosts in network (amount = 100) we can see that the network mainly consists of these domains:
As the biggest (recieving most links from network) and most central actor we have BIO (The Biotechnology Industry Organisation), which is both recieving most links from the network and is linking the most to the network. In this network we have a mix of blogs and corporate firms. BIO and different branches of this organisation is clearly placed as the connecting link between a wing of corporates and expert bloggers (mainly lawyers). Non of the corporates link to any of the blogs. Corporations such as Abbot, AstraZeneca, Amgen, Baxter, and Merck only link to domains with .gov suffixes and to BIO. They do not link directly to the blogs but are connected to the blogs through BIO. Other than the governmental or industry institutions linking to each other we have a dense webwork of bloggers interlinking to eachother (and through their webpages to the intellectual property law firms each blogger is connected to). Another interesting observation is that BIO is linking to several blogs (represented by bloggers who are what we would consider 'expert' patent attorneys) but no law firm is represented in the network. Also interesting is it that corporation are not in our source set but are represented in our issue network. They are not linking to the broader network nor taking a clear stance in the controversy, but they are clearly aknowledged by the ownership network.
From the Urls or hosts in network (amount = 100) we can see that the network mainly consists of these domains:
- .org = 41
- .com = 37
- .gov = 10