| The doctrine of novelty is likely to affect the patentability of chemical compounds in a far more profound manner. Under the novelty rules, a patent may be invalidated by published prior art that both describes and enables the claims of the patent. In the field of chemistry, the creation of invalidating prior art has historically been expensive; the synthesis of a novel chemical compound is research intensive, and the cost to physically publish the information is non-trivial.
Historically, we may look at this expense as having two important effects. First, it sets the cost of generating invalidating prior art close to the cost of doing the research necessary to actually file a patent. Although filing a patent requires additional research into the usefulness of the compound, this is unlikely to cost orders of magnitude more than the research necessary for synthesis. Second, it has made the actual cost of filing the patent, while non-trivial, cheaper in relation to the amounts of capital spent on research and development. These ratios encourage the development of patents, as opposed to the generation of public prior art; both ratios decrease the marginal cost of applying for a patent over simply publishing information into the public domain.
With the trivialization of the enablement step and the advent of near-zero-cost publishing on the internet, both these ratios shift substantially. A public internet wiki with computationally inexpensive algorithms for permuting and enabling molecular structures drops the cost of publishing invalidating prior art to nearly nothing. Although a pharmaceutical company may
The identification of interesting compounds, however the
, has been nearly For the purposes of this essay, this historical expense is interesting because of two ratios. The first ratio describes the cost of developing and publishing invalidating prior art versus doing the research necessary to actually file a patent. Historically, these costs have generally been of similar magnitudes; although a patent requires additional research into the usefulness of the compound, any demonstrated use will suffice to fulfill th
is the With computationally cheap methods of generating descriptions |