Information Liberation

Thanks to danny of danny's reviews for pointing that the full text of Against Intellectual Property (which we ran a chapter of back in July is online in full now.

Comments

You are wrong.

[gaijin_]

The most known example of this is the Arabica coffee bean in the eastern parts of Africa. Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe) The reason is that this company has isolated the gene that makes this plant resistant to a very widespread coffee disiese that kills cromps in the entire region. The arabica coffee is the only one resistant. This company hasn't made any changes, they have only found the gene, but still they get to collect royalties.

Re:You are wrong.

[update()]

If farmers are being barred from growing existing crops because of new patents, I would consider that appalling and disgraceful.

Now convince me that such a thing exists.

I've read assertions like that before and a web search turns up more. But can you show me anything convincing that it's true? There is a patent on a disease resistance gene in Arabica, and fungicides or new variants based on that gene could be included under its protection. But telling farmers "We've patented your plant. Pay us to keep growing it?" I'm not convinced.

There are issues like when a company identifies a therapeutic compound from a plant grown in a foreign country. How do you sort out the conflicting claims of the country to which the plant is native, the culture which told the researchers their knowledge of which plants are valuable for health and the drug company that sorted through thousands of candidates, identified promising ones, isolated the active agent, created a less toxic and more effective variant and paid for the clinical trials? That's a tough question but it shouldn't be mixed up in what strikes me as FUD about telling the people they can no longer use the plant to treat their ulcers.

By the way, as I spend yet another Christmas Day in the lab, I invite all the people who are going to be yapping at me about how my work belongs to humanity and how I should be content with whatever bone they condescend to throw me to come over and run a few gels so I can eat lunch.

Japanese Patent Law, etc.

[Alien54]

Disclaimer: IANAL

but I seen to recall that in Japan the patent laws are more liberal in some regards than in the USA.

(Of course, if you are expert in Japanese Patent law, please feel free to correct any errors, and make me look like a complete fool) ;-)

Japaness law has changed recently, but this is the way it has been for many years. Here is a link to a specific case that is easy enough to follow, and illustrates the point well enough. It also reveals recent shifts in Japanese law:

The Epoch case is truly an "epoch" making decision in Japanese case law.

First, the court's analysis in the case shows a stark contrast with Japanese courts' analyses in early decisions on claim interpretation.

These decisions relied on the inventor's recognition theory and limited the protection scope to cover only embodiments expressly disclosed in the specification.

This rule applied to both functionally defined claims and structurally defined claims.

However, the Tokyo District Court clearly rejected this view by refusing to use embodiments to limit the claim scope.

Further, the addition of functions or steps did not prevent the court from finding infringement in Epoch case. This contrasts highly with some early cases.

It goes something like this. Minor variations qualified the unit as a separate patent.

The upshot probably is not as serious as needing to have patents on green cars vs blue cars (for example), but patents had to be on specific implementations of things. I am not enough of a lawyer to know how much of this is still the case.

But Reverse engineering so that there are some marginal performance differances was common, and there are a lot of copycats that did exactly that. (Sometime old habits die hard.) You build something, say a car engine. They reverse engineer it, find out all of the really important stuff like your design tricks, and them implement them in their own designs.

This situation is really similar to learning code by reading code. The problem is in the setup costs to get production ramped up.

In the USA it is a little more liberal, in that patent can cover more general principles. Things, for example, like the integrated circuit. They did not have to patent all possible circuit implementations of that technology. And their Patent ran out after the usual length of time.

But this is where we get into trouble, because this is where patents get applied to software. A possible incorrect analogy is made between something that involves a manufacturing process (an engine, for example) compared to something that does not.

Quick research reveals that Japans' Patent law was revised in 1998 to correct some of the problems inherent in this. Here is a link to a quick summaryThe important section in this has to do with Design law.

This is all interesting in that it provides a practical example to the problems in different implementations of Patent Law. It has interesting parallels to the the discussions regarding software design, etc.

Re:Japanese Patent Law, etc.

[Alien54]

There is a reasonable summary of current Japanese Law here.

To Clarify a change in the Japanese design law. Previously you could only patent a design for a complete item. Patents on the separate parts were not permitted, so it seems