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IANAL but that's not what I understood from what my patent attorney described.

You probably need a doctorate to be able to read this but USPTO defines Prior Art Machiavellicaly.

A slightly more consumable description is here.

Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges

I think those only apply to civil cases.

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Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges.

The trifling cost aside, this seems to suggest that the DEA is aware that their case is fatally weak, and relies on sifting mountains of data that no jury on earth is capable of understanding in the hope of finding some faint pattern in the data that suggests intent. If there were obvious infractions, it would be easy to prove by pointing out 20 or 30 of them and call it a day. If it is so subtle that you need two terabytes to prove it, you probably don't have much of a case anyway.

Even if the Goods Doctor (see what I did there?) was guilty as hell, and the DEA is worried that purging some evidence and concentrating on specific acts might give grounds for appeal due to hiding evidence, the simple precaution of copying it to cheap off line storage should be sufficient.

Something is rotten about this whole story, and I suspect its a huge smoke screen for some other operation, or perhaps proceeding with the case would put methods or undercover operatives at risk, or require personnel that are current not available. Or maybe they know the Doctor is on his death bed or will soon contract some fatal disease, at which will make the whole point moot. Or maybe the doctor is singing like a canary these days.

"A trademark is an asset. Assets may be seized under most drug laws. The gov grabs the trademark at which point it is illegal to use said trademark without permission. "

Control over Trademarks by the holder is NOT absolute!!

Trademarks are subject to thing like the Doctrine of First Sale.
I.E. Once a holder has sold or given a trademarked item away, the holder looses any right to control that item.

The police can't confiscate jackets off of members backs without incurring significant legal costs..

To get around any trademark limitation they could produce 10,000 patches, (before the seizure is final), and sell them for a dollar a piece to a 3rd party, who would then distribute/sell them to members..

The original poster merely stated that "[f]acts of nature (such as the sequence of a gene) are not patentable." If we're going to narrow the discussion to only discovered sequences instead of created sequences, then we have to consider the patenting of the uses of said sequences.

Numerous patents exist for various genetic tests, and this is widely considered to be legal. After all, it's natural to patent novel uses of existing materials, and the current standard for non-obviousness is lax enough to allow the patent-described use of a set of genes whose function was previously unknown to qualify. While the genes themselves can't be patented, any interaction with them for the purpose of diagnosing an illness can be.

In addition, the CAFC heard In re Fisher in 2005 on patents on gene fragments (discovered in nature). The decision struck down the use patents for gene fragments, but only were they do not have a "specific and substantial" utility. In other words, where patents on gene fragments do have "specific and substantial" utility, they are allowed.

Now, if patents can cover any practical uses of a gene outside of natural reproduction, then it's equivalent to patenting the gene itself for purposes of what patent protection grants to the holder of the patent. A suitably broadly written patent and claims can easily nail down any practical application of a gene sequence, so we've already long crossed that line.

This isn't a small lawsuit either. MP3.com wants $175

This isn't a small lawsuit either. MP3.com wants $175 million.