Team:Shanghai Metro/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practice
In order to get the public to know more about our project's meaning and get
feedback from the opinions of the community, we have taken several human practices activities.
Interview
Interview with Ms. Zheng
We had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Zheng Mingjie of Shanghai Synergy Law Firm,
who has over 10 years of experience in the patent field. She served as a patent examiner at the State
Intellectual Property Office and the Patent Re-examination Board from 2006 to 2013. During her long tenure
as an examiner, she independently resolved nearly 1,000 cases, one of which was selected as one of the "Top
10 Patent Invalidation Cases in China" by the Patent Re-examination Board in 2013.
Mr. Zheng has been involved in patent cases related to edible mushrooms. Because
different countries have different systems and policies for patent protection, the strains are very easy to
copy. After doing several cultivations and forming a new variety, the researchers intended to protect a new
plant variety. Still, unfortunately, it was not included in the protection of a new plant variety before
because the variation between strains was very small. They sought two routes for patent protection at that
time, one of which was microbial conservatorship base for strain protection. This route was difficult to
compare when the infringement was verified. For example, if you buy a strain in the market, and the strain
in the conservation center is the same species, being credibly recognized is very difficult. In addition to
this, the prestige and the specificity of the patent can be confirmed by the fragment of the genetic
molecule. But the problem was that they did not list the molecular sequence, i.e., the specific fragment,
directly but wrote the amplification sequence in the patent. This move increased the difficulty of
infringement protection. Patent ‘infringement follows the principle of comprehensive coverage. It is
unrealistic to argue that the other party also produced this sequence in the production process, and this
aspect eventually could not move forward. However, there was an invalidation procedure in addition to the
patent application, and the opponent wanted to invalidate this patent and thus lose its monopoly. This case
was won in the invalidation because no 100% similar gene sequence was found so it remained valid. Since they
were convinced that someone else had stolen the strain, which was distinguishable by its appearance, the
case was subsequently reopened. But in the end, instead of a 100% comparison, only the specific fragments
were compared. The current attitude of the court is also inclined to protect the original.
Nowadays, the patent protection law in the business patent has been relatively
mature, but the patent in biotechnology needs to be further improved. Mr. Zheng mentioned that in terms of
the protection system of the patent law, some subjects of protection are excluded. For example, in the
United States, there are procedures to protect diagnostic and therapeutic methods, but this is excluded in
China. There is a correlation between these actions and the fact that they should not be monopolized in the
country, but after systematization or productization, this technology can be protected. So, in today's
industry, most industries will take the form of trade secrets to protect the technology so that others
cannot access the core technology in any way.
When asked whether we should disclose the technology or apply for patent protection
as early as possible, Mr. Zheng said that the protection of patents and intellectual property rights is a
kind of feedback to the original creator to promote a virtuous circle, so that people can find benefits from
it to promote the development of technology more strongly. It is a terrible thing to let all the innovators
not get the feedback. On the other hand, the monopoly of intellectual property rights is actually
progressive for society, and patents are essentially invented to promote innovation. So, finding a
reasonable balance of interests between monopoly and protection of intellectual property is the direction to
work on in the future.
Interview with Dr. Zhang
We interviewed Dr. Liang Zhang from the School of Basic Medicine of Shanghai Jiao
Tong University and asked him questions about our project. When we asked Dr. Zhang whether, in his opinion,
the development of strain culture technology is always accompanied by the development of corresponding laws
and means to protect rights, he believed that the country is still weak in this area. There are indeed
relevant laws, but the cost of seeking legal help is too high unless the goods or technologies have
significant commercial value. It isn't easy to be adequately protected. The country attaches great
importance to patents, and the relevant protection regulations will become more and more perfect in the
future. After that, we asked if there were any other protection measures before this patented technology of
our subject was invented. Dr. Zhang Liang told us that this is a gradual maturation of the law, from the
initial lack of protection to rough protection and the final refined rule. To protect a patent, the
probability of exploiting a legal loophole is an essential factor. According to the development of patents,
the law is constantly being amended, and the protection mechanism is becoming more and more complete. Dr.
Zhang believes that if a strain is stolen, the losses that the holder will suffer are easy to associate
with, for example, a movie's impact when there is piracy. If a company spends a lot of money developing a
later directly pirated strain, it can cause significant commercial losses. A patent on a strain is a
technical patent, where something is made to have a certain function by modification or design. Because for
strains, the most significant investment is in the R&D stage, just like when you plant a fruit tree and when
it is about to bear fruit, someone else comes and takes the fruit away. The loss is quite extensive. Dr.
Zhang said he has only seen strain patents in the U.S. companies, such as some backward countries will copy.
This involves a more profound concept is the business strategy of these companies with patents, for example,
Windows has long known that there are many pirated systems in other countries but will not choose to defend
the rights because it needs to occupy the market, like fattening up the pigs after picking the fattest one
to kill (litigation). It's like fattening up a pig and then selecting the fattest one to kill (litigation).
There is no blatant piracy in the U.S., but there are legal loopholes that can be exploited. Some people
will analyze technology, improve it, and find a patent loophole to apply for a new patent, but there is no
lawsuit. Finally, we asked an experiment-related question. We were doing PCR to replicate a 500bp gene
sequence that was unsuccessful, and the electrophoresis ran out a little shorter in length. In this regard,
Dr. Zhang suggested that we clone the gene sequence into the vector and send it to the company for
sequencing to know whether the molecular weight is less or not, and if the runout strip is equal to or less
than 100bp, then we may not have the target strip needed for PCR. Dr. Zhang felt that our project is
valuable and meaningful because it is far more reliable to solve the problem fundamentally than to defend
the rights from the text, and the future application prospect is also more excellent.
Interview with Mr. Zhang
We spoke to Mr. Anton Zhang, an industry consultant with an in-depth understanding
of the pharmaceutical industry. He said that in addition to strains being highly patentable, drugs are also
highly patentable in his field of work. Patents for pharmaceuticals are registered and take a long time to
apply for state approvals. In addition, he said that the promotion of drugs is carried out in cooperation
with medical institutions or outsourcing the drugs to sales platforms for promotion (e.g. CSOs). Regarding
the patent system, Mr. Zhang said that the patent system must be improved. Although the commercial patent
protection is mature, it is still lacking in biological fields such as strains, drugs and vaccines. So he
believes that based on professional judgment, technical protection for strain patents is necessary. For
pharmaceutical companies, it is crucial to improve the company's core competitiveness and prevent the drug
value chain from being copied or improved. Consultant Zhang proposed three measures to deal with the
frequent technology theft. First, it is to make substantial improvements. For example, for strains, he
recognized our team's technology that can solve the problem at the root. Secondly, he suggested that R&D
institutions should transform from "me too" to "me better", increase R&D investment and bring in overseas
and domestic talents. He praised that our project is a major problem in the current research field and is
very valuable. At the end of the interview, Mr. Zhang gave us great encouragement and expressed his
willingness to help us solve problems at any time.
Street Interview
One of the secrets of gaining an advantage in business competition is to provide a
product with unique benefits that can stand out in the market. And another equally important secret is that
opponents cannot copy this advantage casually. This advantage includes many aspects, such as the name of a
company, a slogan, innovative technology, or a short melody, which are collectively referred to as
"intellectual property rights." Companies will invest a lot of time and money to create and protect
intellectual property rights. On this basis, we want to understand people's attention and cognition of
intellectual property through social research, especially in life sciences. In this way, we are helping to
develop the application of patented strain protection technology.
We interviewed more than 50 people during the interview, and the interviewees'
educations ranged from elementary school, junior high school, high school, undergraduate, to postgraduate.
Among them, there are many high school and undergraduate degrees. Most people interviewed do not have a deep
understanding of intellectual property rights, and only a few people have a particular knowledge of
intellectual property rights in life sciences. Most people said that strain patent protection technology is
necessary, but only a few people think it is unnecessary. According to statistics, the higher the
educational background, the better understanding of intellectual property and patent protection. Nearly half
of the respondents with a high school degree or below have little intellectual property rights.
In recent years, the biomedical industry has developed rapidly, and the awareness
of intellectual property protection of biomedical companies has gradually increased. However, the primary
intellectual property knowledge discussed in this social research is only the basic knowledge of
intellectual property legal issues frequently faced in the operation of biomedical companies. We hope that
people can build up enough knowledge reserves in intellectual property and life sciences under our
promotion. It can also promote the advancement of strain patent protection technology to a certain extent.
Questionnaire
In the early stage of our project,
in order to better understand the Chinese general public's understanding of property rights and patents, our
team designed a set of questionnaires and forwarded them on various websites.
From the final results, most of the
people who filled out the questionnaire were under 18 years old, and 94.34% of them had seen plagiarism in
their lives, which shows that plagiarism is a very common thing in today's life. It has invaded the lives of
underage people. It is not uncommon for teenagers to plagiarize, and many of them have used resources that
infringe on property rights. Our questionnaire shows that 59.75% of them have used pirated resources. The
survey shows that teenagers mainly use pirated resources because it is difficult to get resources through
normal channels. They can only use pirated and genuine resources because they are more expensive and
unaffordable. Nowadays, the price of the genuine market is too high, and many pirated versions are free or
even available at a lower price. This means that teenagers do not have enough financial means to afford
licensed copies, and we lack many channels for licensed resources in China. Therefore, we can see that
teenagers nowadays often use pirated resources because of their weak economic power, which is the reason for
the uncontrolled growth of pirated resources. Although most of them have used pirated resources, they all
understand intellectual property rights, mostly from related books or lectures. Still, a large part of them
have been exposed to intellectual property rights through the experiences of people around them and by
learning professional knowledge. In the design of this questionnaire, we specially designed some surveys on
IPR professions in this questionnaire. We found that people in this age group pay more attention to the ©®™
logo, indicating that this age group still attaches more importance to IPR. After selecting the options of
what is intellectual property infringement, we found that the percentage of minors who use other people's
strain patents and papers with high repetition rate is the lowest, which shows that they do not consider
these two items as constituting intellectual property crimes, and also shows that they do not know enough
about strains and biomedical science, which also shows that young people do not know the danger and
importance of stealing strains. By selecting the type of intellectual property, we know that 94.87% of the
adolescents believe patents are intellectual property rights, but only 54.49% believe that the infringement
of samples is intellectual property. This further indicates a need to increase awareness of patent
protection of samples and pay more attention to the infringement of samples. The percentage of people
willing to take other protection measures if they are infringed and the legal means are too complicated is
70.44%.
There were 69 valid questionnaires
among 19-30 years old in the questionnaire. The number of people who have seen incidents of plagiarism in
their lives is 89.86%, many young people are the ones who have seen incidents of plagiarism, and a few are
the ones who have violated property rights in their careers. This is the age of entrepreneurship, and most
people inevitably encounter incidents of plagiarism. The number of people using pirated resources in this
age group is also very high, with 75.36% of the personnel. Most of the reasons for their use of pirated
resources are very similar to the option of a large number of resources in the 0-18 age group is the
percentage is very similar. Still, the difference is that this age group does not have the economic problems
of underage people. Most of them have a certain economic base, which also shows that pirated movies are used
in all age groups and are not influenced by economic power. The main exposure to intellectual property in
this age group is through books or lectures and professional knowledge, the same as in the 0-18 age group.
More than half of them have some knowledge of IP-related laws. In contrast, the remaining 37.68% have no
knowledge of IP-related laws, which is not a small percentage, proving that people's knowledge in this area
is still insufficient. A lot of publicity is needed to reduce piracy and give some respect to originality.
Compared to other options, 19-30 year olds still do not know enough about biomedicine and strains, which
shows the coldness of strains and highlights the importance of our technology. 72.46% of them are willing to
protect their patents and strains through other means, and the legal means are too complicated. Protection
measures to protect their patents and technologies.
In the age groups of 31-45 and
46-60, most of them have encountered or come into contact with similar incidents of plagiarism and use
pirated books and pirated film and TV resources, mainly through relevant books or lectures and professional
knowledge. They are knowledgeable about the legal profession of knowledge-related property rights. Just like
teenagers and minors, they are also willing to solve patent theft by other means than lawful means. Only
46.15% of them believe that exploiting someone else's strain patent violates intellectual property
infringement.
The remaining nine questionnaires came from people over 60 years old, an age group
that is basically elderly and mostly retired. In their daily lives, plagiarism is not uncommon because in
their era, plagiarism incidents were not as strictly controlled by-laws as they are now. In those days,
pirated resources and theft of patents were not uncommon. Among these nine people, all of them had used
pirated resources. No one over the age of 60 was very aware of the laws related to intellectual property.
They were only occasionally aware of ©®™, mostly because society did not regulate piracy with the same
intensity. And none of them consider sample infringement to be an intellectual property right. This suggests
that the over-60 age group is less receptive to other approaches than the law and is not very knowledgeable
about sample infringement.
From the above data, we can see that plagiarism is still very common in the life of
the public, and most people will use pirated resources for economic or other reasons, which means that
people do not pay much attention to the protection awareness of intellectual property rights. In this piece
of protection awareness, we still need to raise people's awareness and publicize the importance of property
rights. Most of them learn about intellectual property rights through relevant books or lectures, followed
by learning professional knowledge. We can promote our way of patent protection through these two methods.
At the same time, the survey shows that people do not know this piece of strains, reflecting the importance
of this technology more. We will expand the scope of publicity correspondingly to make people understand
more. This questionnaire is a good reflection of people's just lack and problems. It provides a better basis
for our team to understand people's current needs and concerns so that we can develop technologies that are
beneficial to society.
