tokyo

The difference between Japan and the United States in their attitude towards intellectual property rights was highlighted last week when a Japanese researcher was accused of removing research data from a laboratory without proper authorization.

Yoichi Ito, a physician who was completing a research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was charged with stealing research material three days before he was due to return to Japan.

He is accused of removing his research notes and materials from the clinic, as well as downloading research data from the clinic's computer going back to 1990.

Ito, who had been working on gene sequencing in the clinic's cartilage and connective-tissue laboratory, told the US magistrate in St Paul, Minnesota, that he “did not understand what was happening”, according to a report by the Associated Press.

But the Mayo clinic says he was warned on his arrival that the clinic held the rights to his research work, and that he would be required to return all materials produced during his term when he left.

Jesse Bradley, a spokesman for the clinic, says that all the regulations had been specified in Ito's contract. “We are just trying our best to get our research data back,” he says.

Although US institutions can impose stringent rules on the protection of such data, Japan has no regulations covering the rights to a researcher's work outside the framework of standard patent and copyright laws.

“There are no legal requirements for researchers to return their research documents when they leave an institution,” says Yoshio Namba, of the intellectual property division of the Japan Science and Technology Corporation, a semi-governmental organization that runs a fellowship programme for overseas researchers to work in Japanese laboratories. “Such requirements are not included in the contract for overseas researchers either.”

“Research institutions do not have legal control over the researchers' documents unless they are particular types of computer programs, with strict regulations on copyrights,” says Hiroko Saito, who is responsible for intellectual property rights issues at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research.

Some scientists say that the different legal structure and general ‘culture’ of Japanese labs compared with those elsewhere could pose serious threats to collaborative research and exchange programmes.