There's a fortune to be made and a lot of talk about a new normal, but will it be the old normal of big pharma that treaps the reward and takes the public hostage in return for a cure? Now's the time for governments like Canada, currently contributing massive public finance, formerly so scarce, it was said, to the search for a vaccine, to set some conditions on their largesse. If governments are not to own the vaccine outright then another option that moves us toward a fuller social economy is for publicly accountable states to require payback for any enterprise that wins the COVID intellectual property lottery, Here are a couple of suggestions: require any vaccine to be in the public domain or governed by a creative commons license. Crisis is opportunity and now is the time for "the common better" to establish a new kind of public ownership for the fruits of our common human endeavour. Let the example of legendary no-patent, no-copyright radiation inventor and double Nobel winner Marie Curie be the world's inspiration. Nobody "owns" knowledge; it is a social outcome that belongs in our shared knowledge commons, the universal library of all we know.
# posted by Taodhg @ 1:07 am
