Answer for: Do intellectual property laws have a negative or positive impact on society and culture?
#4 The patenting of genetic information has a negative impact.
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There are probably many other instances where this can hurt scientific progress- drug patents, for instance. Too often scientific discovery is treated as proprietary, making it difficult or impossible for other scientists to continue or branch out from the work that has been done. Medical progress suffers in particular. Most science should be for the benefit of all. And thankfully, there is an unstoppable movement afoot, driven to some extent by web applications and technology, to make collaboration easier and more global- and scientists are beginning to overcome the fear of being "scooped" and embrace the possibilities, finding potential collaborators and connections to related research through scientific social networks, which allow them to share ideas and get feedback from their peers much faster than through traditional publishing models. And authors and their academic institutions are slowly beginning to accept that peer review via open-access publishing is equally valid.
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