The SARS-COV-2 pandemic and the challenges of intellectual property rights

Abstract

The COVID-19 virus pandemic had a drastic impact on the social lives of billions of people, hitting certain industries like a hurricane. What the answer will be to this and possible other occurrences of pandemics in the future will largely depend on the inventiveness of the researchers. Intellectual property is the first system to offer answers, opening patent bases to anyone developing new technologies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for the means of prevention, treatment, and care has caused thousands of different researches, which find inspiration and guidance for discovering new solutions in patents that already exist. Publication of scientific papers has never been so intense in any scientific field as in medicine since the fight against this virus began. The time since the beginning of the virus pandemic has shown that science and innovators are ready for such challenges, but the global health crisis has imposed a new challenge on the intellectual property system, which refers to the strict implementation of its rights at times when rapid and global effect is needed in order to avoid additional deterioration due to further circulation of the virus among the population, which inevitably leads to the emergence of new strains of the virus.

Keywords: pandemic; COVID-19; intellectual property; authorship; patents