Sharing manufacturing intellectual property can help us protect against COVID-19

Translated from——spectrum

We need to rethink how we make products to get out of this crisis

In 2012, Netflix released Chaos Monkey, an open-source tool for triggering random failures in critical computing infrastructure. Similar stress tests, at least in simulations, have been applied in other contexts, such as banks, but we have never conducted such stress tests on industrial production during a pandemic.

COVID-19 has undoubtedly demonstrated the fragility of the world’s lean inventory and just-in-time delivery system. Many countries are in desperate need of critical medical supplies and equipment, even as we’re still groping for the switch that will get the global economy going again. This means people must be able to make products where and when they’re needed, and from locally sourced components. This is a big problem, since much of our technology comes from faraway places, often in seamless, opaque packaging—like a smartphone, where all surfaces hide from view.

The production of even the most basic products may be hampered by secrecy or opacity, making it difficult to learn how to make them or otherwise recreate their functionality. While we often view these obstacles as part of normal business practices, they present unexpected barriers to keeping the world moving during the current crisis.

So we must do everything we can to lower barriers to manufacturing, starting with new flexibilities in manufacturing and intellectual property. Companies are already rising to this challenge.

For example, Medtronic freely shared the design and code for its portable ventilator, enabling other capable manufacturers to undertake the construction and distribution of enough equipment to meet peak demand during the pandemic. Countless other electronic devices, from routers to thermostats, operate in critical environments and need to be replaced immediately if they fail. Where those cannot be replaced, we will be in a deeper ditch.

It would be ideal if any device could be “printed” on demand. In some areas, we already have the capability to produce quickly, but addressing the breadth of the current crisis will require a comprehensive database of product designs, tests, firmware, and so on. That infrastructure barely exists right now, which highlights a real danger: if we don’t build a distributed, global build-it-now mechanism, we could exhaust our existing stocks and be unable to replenish them. Then we’d be in real trouble.

Many companies are undoubtedly wary of handing over their intellectual property, even to meet critical needs. This tension between normal business practices and the public interest mirrors the dilemma facing individual privacy versus public health. Yet we urgently need to find a way to share trade secrets only temporarily — to protect a world where businesses can one day operate normally.

Some governments have indicated that they have more flexibility to enforce patent and intellectual property protections during this crisis. Yet more is needed. Like Medtronic, companies should take risks, open up, and share their trade secrets to provide guidance to others (even former competitors) and help accelerate our path to a post-pandemic economy. Sharing today will make that payoff faster. To paraphrase a wise old technologist, we will either hang together or we will undoubtedly hang apart.