Code of practice launched to protect intellectual property

Irish research discoveries would lead to more investment and more jobs if they were adequately protected, according to the Tánaiste, Ms Harney.Failure to control intellectual property from laboratories had already meant the loss of commercial opportunities, she added.

"You won't get the full benefit from publicly funded research unless you can protect the intellectual property," Ms Harney said yesterday at the Dublin launch of a national code of practice for managing intellectual property (IP) from publicly funded research.

"In the past, a lot of discoveries weren't commercialised because they weren't protected," she stated.

The Republic does relatively poorly on the patenting of ideas. Figures for 1999 presented at yesterday's briefing showed that the Republic held about 13 patents per million population compared with Finland at 75 per million, Denmark at 45 per million, the EU average at 35 per million and Japan at 90 per million.

The Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (ICSTI), which advises on science policy, prepared the code of practice, which outlines how research organisations should introduce well-defined guidelines for protecting and commercialising scientific discoveries.

"We are involved in a product of the mind", not a traditional industrial product, chairman Dr Edward Walsh said.

"The national code attempts to provide us with a fair and balanced approach" that protects researchers, venture funders and enterprise, he said.

The code is aimed at the executive levels of universities and institutes, urging them to protect intellectual assets coming from the labs, stated Dr Ena Prosser, director of Enterprise Ireland's biotech directorate and chairwoman of the science council group that prepared the code of practice.

Patenting was the main way to protect IP, she said, but copyright and the protection of "know- how" were also valuable.

Establishing a comprehensive, worldwide patent could cost up to €50,000 and take seven years, but Enterprise Ireland launched a patenting support fund last week.

Research groups could draw on this fund provided they could prove a business case for any discovery with commercial potential, Dr Prosser added.