A Presumption of Sharing: Norms for Learning and for Increasing Access to Health Care

Professor of Business Administration in Economics Tracy Lewis is investigating new avenues for implementing a presumption of sharing to improve access to medical care worldwide and within the United States.

The fruit of inventive activity, intellectual property, has traditionally been protected with exclusive property rights. The underlying presumption has been that inventors are entitled to own and manage their innovations without any obligation to share their discoveries with others. Yet, recently it has become apparent that our property right system does not work well in some important respects. A property rights regime where innovators are motivated by the promise of financial rewards does not guarantee that socially valuable, but commercially neglected interests won’t be ignored. Moreover, the process for disseminating and employing new technologies is also out of kilter under the current system. In response to these problems, some legal and economic scholars have advocated a fundamental shift from the presumption of exclusive property rights to a presumption of sharing. Under the sharing regime, the governing norm is that innovators will share their property with follow on users, provided that they are duly compensated for their creative efforts.

This research project will investigate two avenues for implementing a presumption of sharing to improve the access to medical care worldwide and within the United States:

Public Sponsorship and Disclosure of Clinical Drug Trials
Technology Trusts and Patent Pools.