Property Interests and A Cure For AIDS
This paper will examine the possible types of property interests which may be asserted in a future cure for AIDS and the argument that there should be no property interests allowed in such a cure. In particular, this paper will examine the argument that no person or entity should be able to assert the traditional property right of excludability in a cure for AIDS.
Property has traditionally been described as an aggregate, or bundle, of rights over a subject, including the rights of possession, enjoyment, use, disposition, and exclusion. Of coarse, these rights may be asserted over tangible and intangible property, intangible property being rights rather than physical objects. As relating to the human body, tangible, or corporeal, property includes physical substances taken from the human body and their derivatives; intangible, or incorporeal, property include patent protection of a human cell line, for example, or a claim to a body's commercial potential. Thus a property interest in a disease cure will usually be the ability to assert certain rights concerning this cure, such as the right to receive profits from the use of this cure, the right to exclude others from profiting from the cure, and the right to sell the previous two rights to others. There are three possible sources of these rights over disease cures: patent law, trade secrets, and personal property law. This third source involves a patient's property interest in his biological tissue, which may be the material source for a disease cure developed by medical researchers.
Patent protection is a statutory invention, there being no precedent for it in common law. The purpose of patent law is to recognize the intellectual property of the inventor, reward the inventor for his services, encourage inventors and industry, and to further early disclosure and dissemination of knowledge. In the United States, the holder of a patent p...