Through legal tools based on economic principles like benefit- sharing contracts and agreements, researchers and companies have attempted to fulfil their obligations to affected groups - compensating groups for their innovations. However, as the work reveals, underlying such tools/agreement are individualist notions of the single authored innovator. (“the idea of indigenes with original and unique— albeit shared— communal knowledge still relied on the concept of priority so integral to the logic of patents for inventors.” 33) But Osseo-Asare shows that the mobility of both biological resources and people who might use or contain them made it difficult to assign benefits to individuals or communities (19)
“Benefit sharing from the profits of patents thus becomes a symbol of the drug industry’s debt to global communities rather than of retrospective justice for specific groups.” (69)
