Slashdot Mirror
Using the USPTO Against Itself
fidget42 writes: "This article in the LA Times tells of how a scientist went about using the patent office as a mechanism for trying to force a change in that office's rules. To quote from the article: 'Nearly 10 years ago, a friend called Stuart Newman with an intriguing challenge: Could he think up a new form of life that would be scientifically useful and possible to patent--yet so disturbing that the public would recoil?' Could the same be done with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) concerning software patents? I know some companies have used the rules of the USPTO to 'spoof' it, most notably Despair, Inc.'s trademarking of the frowney."
;-)
In NO way does Despair's trademark spoof the USPTO. It is a valid trademark for a valid company.
The fact that they applied for it and were granted it was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). They then went on to joke about *patenting* the emoticon and charging people for every time it is used. This might have been the *spoof* part, but not the trademark itself. I wish that people would get this straight.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
"A Method to Force the USPTO to Behave in a Dignified Manner" perhaps?
I would have been tempted to patent a non-human on the basis that "being non-human, it would be unprotected as a human under law and thus able to be exploited as a beast of burden or slave". And even then it might not be morally repugnant enough!
(Hmm, I think my anti-cynic meds are wearing off...)
It seems to me that what is needed is a new declaration on human rights vs technology. The current laws on patents, copyright etc. are being bent past their ability to cope with the new technologies. There are interpretations of judgments, taking into account opinions of what was originally intended by people for whom the current situation was unthinkable. Patches on patches on patches. It's a mess.
We need something new to work from.
Maybe we need to clone some of the thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment and have them draft something for us (that would probably make their cloning illegal).
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
> I think with strong patent protections science can't develop well. Same in software development. If patent holders do not develop the product, no one can.
And therein lies the problem. The rich and powerful in the developed nations aren't interested in the advancement of science and software; they're interested in the next quarterly report.
It's the Tragedy of the Commons, writ large.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Let's think this through for a second. To a non-scientist, making an organism that's part mouse, part human probably sounds like something out of a science-fiction nightmare. So they react with violent emotions, imagining something with a human head, intellect, and feelings, but a mouse body. "How *dare* they suggest something could be used for medical experimentation! The patent office *must* be changed!"
In reality, if they could even get it to work (human/mouse hybrid is a *far* cry from sheep/goat hybrid), a humouse would probably look and behave like a normal mouse. The only difference would be that some of its cells would be human cells. So before you get up in arms, think about the people that have had pig heart translants. They are humans that are not partially made of animal cells. But they don't make your heart leap in fear, do they?
I definitely agree that there should be limits on what can and can't be patented (as well as what should and shouldn't be attempted). But I don't think the humouse falls into this category. To make such a creature would take YEARS and YEARS of careful research and testing. Why shouldn't someone that figures out how to do it receive a patent? Remember, we're not talking about patenting a slave-person, here. We're talking about patenting a mouse who might have half of its cells of human origin.
The guy has a great point...that there are problems in the system. But seeing someone that *knows* how these things really work purposefully leading the public astray through incredible exaggeration just gets my goat.
4-star general in a one-man army.
And afterwards the lawyers took over, and issued patent-applications (and getting them approved) for everything under the sun, even if it's not man made.
Witness patents on DNA. No - they won't charge you for running around with one of their genes, but they will charge you, if you get the idea that you want to know, if it's inside your body, because they have patented any process linked to checking for that specific gene; witness the 2,000 odd dollars it costs in royalties to a specific company, if you want to see if you are carrying the breast cancer gene. No, it doesn't matter what process you use - you want to know if it's there, you have to pay.
Some patents are good, some are bad, and some should be taken out side and shot!
I wholehartedly agree with a poster on Slashdot who once said something to the effect of:
Change the standard procedure, and reject all patent applications by default. If the applicant can't make a good enough case as to why the patent should be granted, then the invention isn't worth patenting.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Patents such as #6,293,874 ("User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks...a user-operated and controlled apparatus for self-infliction of repetitive blows to the user's buttocks by a plurality of elongated arms bearing flexible extensions that rotate under the user's control.") and #6,368,227 ("Method of swinging on a swing," discussed recently in Slashdot) certainly sound as if SOMEONE is trying to prove SOMETHING.
I'm strongly tempted to mail copies of these patents to my congressman with a letter saying, simply, "The patent office is broken. Fix it."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
" Just visited Dispair.com and low and behold the Classic Frowny is free to license, for a limited time. No pushing, no shoving, there are plenty to go a round."
Classic example of submarine patents. Tell everyone it's free to use, get it established as a de facto standard, and then POW. They'll probably try and use some kind of viral marketing, for example getting people to embed them in emails (what happened to the days when emails where plain grammar?).
Don't give in. Stick to Open Source emoticons, even if it does involve a length process of installing and configuring a chinese character set.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I haven't thought about this enough, but something is seriously wrong with the ground rules. The purpose of patent law is to motivate private industry to develop inventions for the public good. Patent law is created and maintained by we the public for our benefit, by definition. Here there is some notion that an invention can itself become part of the public, which sounds like someone (besides just me) is confused. That is, something that was not someone has become someone by human invention. !.
This is a collision of a several loaded issues in one place. The two most obvious to me are the "right to life vs. right to choose" issue, and the "capitalist vs. socialist" debate. The "capitalist vs. socialist" issue is not so obvious so I will address it first.
Suppose we succeeded in defining "life" and decided that life shall not be patentable. Then private industry would stop working on all life containing products, and the public would loose the benefit of oil eating bacteria and similar products. But these products may be so compelling that the public does not want to loose these benefits. So let the public develop them. Furthermore, let the public nationalize inventions surfaced by private industry that encompass "life." Practically speaking, this would mean an absorption by the government of most biotech talent, wherein all research and results would naturally be in the public domain. This may well be in the best interest of the public. There is a qualitative difference between the benefit of a light bulb or a hyperlink and that of a humouse.
Nationalizing biotech would also defuse the "ownership" issue and let people concentrate on the more pertinent issue of ethics.
Which brings me to the "right to life vs. right to choose" issue. If the public cannot decide on the entity status of a human embryo, how on earth is the patent office going to make decisions regarding the property ownership of modifications of the embryo? But then again, perhaps the current status of the law is that an embryo is not an entity. But apparently it is possible for an industry to invent it into an entity, though hopefully not a human entity? Addressing this in the context of patent law is fascinating and insane.
Yeah, it could be used as an argument for the anti-abortion side, but the main goal of this exercise seems to be to limit what can be patented. Do you think people's DNA should be patented? I don't.
What about genetic enhancements for people? Let's say some company engineers and patents a genetic modification that makes people more resistant to disease. Then a couple pays the company to implant these genes into their children during the invitro fertilization. The kids grow up and find out that they will have to pay patent fees to the company should they reproduce--up until the patent expires.
This may sound silly now, however it probably won't be in the future. I could just see the "Patent Enforcement Alliance" (sister company to the BSA) showing up at the hospital to collect patent fees when a baby is born.
I don't have any problem with abortion, but I do have a problem with patenting DNA. Maybe geneticly engineered stuff could fall under copyright, but I am concered how far that could go and what kinds of control it could give to various organizations/people...
BTW, I think the designations left/right wing are silly. It's not accurate to limit all the possible political views on a one dimensional graph. Only a small subset of the normal popluation happen to fall upon this graph. Real people have wide varieties of views and opinions.
Actually, modifying the monkey genome to increase their intelligence a bit, then addict them to a drug for their survival, would make excellent workers. Just keep them looking like monkeys, and keep the IQ down, and keep the agression in check and you've got a patent worth billions.
Maybe we need to clone some of the thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment and have them draft something for us (that would probably make their cloning illegal).
I like your dose of irony, but beyond that, why ban cloning? Cloning is simply a new reproductive method, nothing more. One that is currently fraught with risk, quite probably unacceptable risks at this point in time, much as test-tube reproduction was 40 years ago. Making it illegal, and banning other bioengineering techniques that could be used to create non-human species as smart as ourselves, completely skirts the underlying issue which needs to be clarified: namely the rights of all beings, not merely those who happen to be defined as human, based on some reasonable metric (such as perhaps intelligence, or some broader definition of sapience that factors in degrees of self-awareness and thought, not an easy task I grant you).
Such a regime would require:
1) a definition of sapience, probably one that (a) recognizes sapience and intelligence as a spectrum, and not a binary, condition, (b) uses the human norm as a starting reference, (c) explicitly states that any member of a species with average intelligence comparable to that of a human being or greater, enjoys full 'sapient rights' (what we now call human rights) even if their intelligence is significantly below the norm (e.g. retarded people have, and should have, all the rights of a normal person, even if the average chawowow can outthink them on a good day, but chawowows should not necessarily be considered equal to human), and (d) any unusually intelligent member of a species not normally expected to have human level intelligence or greater would enjoy full sapient rights if their unusually high intelligence is found to be such that, were they they norm, the species would be considered sapient.
2) The definition of species that enjoy full sapient rights (vs. those that do not, i.e. what we typically consider 'animals' or 'dumb machines') must be inclusive of any being demonstrating said level of sapients, regardless of whether they are human or nonhuman, bioengineered or naturally occuring, mineral (machine, crystaline, whatever), animal, or vegitable, or other.
We need a recognition of sapient rights that transcends humanity, not merely to deal with the inevitable results that bioengineering, and quite likley software engineering, is likely to create in the next century, but also to cover contingencies such as meeting alien life in our exploration of space, etc.
It is important, as life evolves and more intelligences arise (artificial or otherwise), that we have a foundation for interacting with that life in an ethical and kindly manner. Banning technologies and cowering behind our outdated religious myths does nothing to prepare us for these eventuality, and indeed increases the liklihood greatly that, if and when we meet intelligences that are other than ourselves, we will react in exactly the wrong way, with prejudice and ethno- or speciecentrism ('intelligent computers have no soul' claim theologens, for example, or 'we created the creature, we are its god, it can never be our equal', both of which are appallingly unethical and quite probably false assumptions to be making, but appear to be our default stance on such things).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Did anyone else notice that this bears a striking resemblance to Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man"?
Specifically, petitioning the system to get "partly not human" declared not human, with the hopes of losing, to set a precedent that "partly human" is legally human.
To me that is a pretty striking example of life imitating art.
I can never get over how ahead of his time that man was.
-Peter
This would be an abuse of process. The courts (rightly) take a dim view of people manufacturing a controversy and then coming to court aiming to lose. Imagine if the 2600 case over DeCSS had not happened. Instead suppose the MPAA had created a small company to host a copy of DeCSS and then sued that company. The front company would put up a lawyer who would make a very weak case, and the MPAA would have gotten a binding precedent set without giving the real opponents of the DMCA a day in court to argue their corner.
These guys are proposing exactly the same abuse. They want a broad precedent against organisms with human cells in, and they propose to get it by creating a court case that does not give the proponents of patenting such organisms a chance to argue against it.
Incidentally, check out Friday by Robert Heinlein for more on this subject.
Paul.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Many people find patenting living organisms offensive. Most people find the idea that a copmany can have a patent on a gene that is in their family repugnant. Nonetheless, there is commercial support for these ideas, and so they go ahead more repugnance be damned. The only result is a weakening of the public capacity to fell moral repugnance.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here's an idea. Let's see how the shoe fits on the other foot.
1. Apply for a patent for: "A method for the promotion of the sciences and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
2. Sue the USPTO for infringing your patent.
-Graham