Free to touch (Image: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty)

You might imagine that vast patent royalties flow into the organisation that invented the touchscreen and the World Wide Web. But the atom-smashing outfit CERN, cradle of both these technologies, doesn’t make a bean from either.

The particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has been reluctant to patent the inventions it creates in pursuit of exotic subatomic entities. But it hopes that will soon change: last week, it struck a deal with the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to ensure that it profits better from its engineers’ innovations in fields like imaging, computing, particle detection and superconducting magnets, says international relations adviser Maurizio Bona.

CERN owes its historic aversion to patenting to its 20 European member states, says spokesman James Gillies. They pump millions of euros into the organisation every year to help develop new technologies – and don’t want to have to pay to use the inventions in their own country. “So we have to square a circle: how do we protect the technology without double-billing member states?”


Touchscreen, anyone?

The answer for much of CERN’s history has been simply to publish details of the inventions in much the same way that the organisation publishes its scientific discoveries. It was through one such publication in 1976 that CERN revealed the capacitive touchscreen – a technology that’s currently taking the smartphone market by storm.

In the mid-1970s, CERN needed a way to directly select control parameters on a TV screen for one of its particle accelerators. Engineers hit on the idea of a transparent capacitive screen overlay – read the full story here. But not patenting the touchscreen technology clearly irks CERN management.

Things began to change after 30 April 1993, however. On that day CERN, and one its computer scientists, Tim Berners-Lee, placed the hypertext transfer protocol – aka the World Wide Web – in the public domain.

The web arguably owes its success to being free, says Gillies. “But after the dust had settled, some at CERN wondered if they could have made money out of it” – leading to a “changed culture” that now more proactively pursues technology transfer and intellectual property.

CERN has some success stories to boast about, particularly in the field of medical imaging. The bismuth germanate and transparent lead tungstate crystals it has developed for its detectors are key in positron emission tomography (PET) scanning and emerging combined PET/MRI systems respectively, for instance. However, it wants to do much more. The fees from these patents pay for the running of CERN’s tech transfer operation – any surplus goes towards funding CERN’s involvement in industrial research and development.

I did it first

“The idea of working with WIPO is that if we come up with today’s equivalent of the touchscreen it doesn’t just languish – we’ll create mechanisms to take it further commercially,” says Gillies.

WIPO is best known for allowing inventors to file a generic world patent application quickly before choosing which of 140 nations they actually want patent coverage in. This gives them a legally solid way to claim they were first to have an idea, yet delay filing a patent for 30 months.

A spokesman for WIPO in Geneva says its agreement with CERN aims to help the lab exploit its intellectual property both through smarter patenting and by transferring its technology to industry. It will also help CERN handle patent disputes.

Bona sees the arrangement as providing CERN with a intellectual property development operation set apart from its scientific output so that the organisation need not divert itself – and its funds – too much from its main role: basic science.

The MIT way

Some are sceptical that the approach will work, however. Peter Finnie, a patent attorney with intellectual property practice Gill Jennings and Every in London, says: “It isn’t immediately apparent to me how WIPO can assist CERN in this way, as this is not its primary function. What CERN needs is a written intellectual property policy to encourage its scientists to identify innovations at an early stage – certainly before any valuable research is published.”

Finnie thinks a trip to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – where Berners-Lee set up the World Wide Web Consortium – might help CERN’s tech transfer managers. “Their US counterparts, like MIT, are well ahead of the game in this respect, generating hard income from large and valuable patent portfolios.”

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