patent
Gene patents ruled invalid - thank god!
This is the stupid logic of the patent lawyer:
"Despite the patents already granted for these genes - patents now in question - scientists and researchers could begin to withhold their information, for fear of not being compensated, experts said.
“You won't have disclosure to move onto the next step in biology,” said Kevin Noonan, a Ph.D.with more than 10 years of experience in the biotechnology field and who is also a practicing patent attorney at Chicago-based McDonnel Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff.
“It's like someone provided all the parts to my car, and right now I have all of these parts on the garage floor and I know what a car looks like and what the parts look like, but I don't have a blueprint to put it together. The problem here is that if you say you can't have a patent for genes than you will have companies that won't disclose their information and then you won't have a blueprint to move forward with.”
The reason that's stupid? It's not equivalent to patenting parts, it's equivalent to patenting the laws of physics. Patents are for inventions, not for basic science discoveries. Business ruins everything...
Wrong take on intellectual property
The author is all over the place, equating any kind of sharing and collaboration (software, music, video) as a anti-individual, mao-ist, anti-capitalist cancer. He writes against "the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual ...
DNA Patents
Another example of evil uses of patents... who though patenting DNA was a good idea???
The challenges to the patents-in-suit raise questions of difficult legal dimensions concerning constitutional protections over the information that serves as our genetic identities and the need to adopt policies that promote scientific innovation and biomedical research. The widespread use of gene sequence information as the foundation for biomedical research means that resolution of these issues will have far-reaching implications, not only for gene-based health care and the health of millions of women facing the specter of breast cancer, but also for the future course of biomedical research. (.pdf)
Halliburton the patent troll patents patent trolling
Another reason why I love patents so much:
"The application covers, quite explicitly, having a company (we'll say Company A) that does not invent something, find a company (Company B) that did invent something, but chose to use trade secret protection, rather than patents. Then, the Company A files a patent covering Company B's technology, and then use the issued patent to get money out of Company B."
