Abstract :
The paper states that researchers are trying to make biotechnology open source amid concerns that corporate interests will block their work with patents. The issue of patent-based monopolies in the drugs business became one of the campaigning issues for the Swedish Pirate Party,ostensibly on the back of revulsion at anti-filesharing legislation introduced by the Swedish government. People have outlined alternatives to the current situation, in which, having paid for the research, pharmaceutical companies get to enjoy a monopoly supply situation for 20-odd years, assuming that the resulting treatment actually works. This is the pact that governments of industrialised nations made with inventors more than a century ago: in exchange for revealing trade secrets, inventors are protected from competition for a finite period of time.