Benefit Sharing
Instead of Revenue Sharing with individuals, this process allows benefits to be shared with source communities from which positive externalities have been derived.
Definition
"benefit sharing "refers to a commitment to channel some kind of returns -- whether monetary or non-monetary -- back to the range of designated participants: affected communities, source communities or source nations, participants in clinical trials, genetic disease patient groups." (http://research.iftf.net/node/721)
Description
From Howard Rheingold at http://research.iftf.net/node/721:
"According to Cori Hayden in "Benefit-Sharing: Experiments in Governance," benefit sharing "refers to a commitment to channel some kind of returns -- whether monetary or non-monetary -- back to the range of designated participants: affected communities, source communities or source nations, participants in clinical trials, genetic disease patient groups." Experiments in forms of benefit sharing were necessitated by the conflicts that arose when commercial interests began to use plants, microbes, insects, folk medicine and other traditional knowledge as the basis for new pharmaceutical, agricultural, or biotechnological products. Eli Lilly, for example, profited commercially (and cancer patients benefited) from making Vincristine, a widely used cancer medicine -- without compensating anyone in Madagascar, where traditional folk doctors were the original users of the Rosy Periwinkle plant, the source of the medicine. When an American firm patented the use of the oil of the Neem tree as a natural agricultural pest repellent, the India government successfully sued
The 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity institutionalized principles of benefit sharing in such cases. In practice, benefit-sharing arrangements are complex, involving intellectual property rights, scientific research protocols, ethical guidelines for cultural practices, international laws, alongside the legalities of license agreements and royalty contracts. (It is instructive to note that different sets of complexities necessitated decades of adjudication and negotiation for the first water-sharing arrangements to take hold in Southern California, but once the first ones were worked out, such arrangements spread quickly.) Impact
Benefit-sharing is a potential remedy for a wide range of conflicts of interest between individuals, institutions, and commons -- the individuals who contribute a valuable cell line, the tribe that knows of a medicinal plant, the nation in whose soil an antibiotic microbe is found. As in the case of copyright laws, these conflicts balance incentive for innovation versus the eventual contribution to public goods -- a limited monopoly to innovators, whose innovations become available to everyone under certain circumstances (AIDs medications) or at a certain time (expiration of copyright and reversion to public domain of literary works)." (http://research.iftf.net/node/721)
More Information
Cori Hayden, "Benefit-Sharing: Experiments in Governance" http://programs.ssrc.org/ccit/publications/hayden-benefitsharing.doc