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SCOTUS To Hear Patentable Thought Case
skayell writes "The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a landmark patent case involving whether or not thoughts and relationships are patentable. Michael Crichton's essay in the New York Times attempts a thoughtful summary of Metabolite's primary assertion: they not only own the connection between homocysteine levels in the blood and vitamin B12 deficiency, but also any thought connecting the two."
will happen because of the absurdities growing in both Patent and Copyright Law. This is what it feels like to be a test monkey in a laboratory, folks.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Sing along. I'm sure you know the words...
"It's the end of the world as we know it...It's the end of the world as we know it..."
1. 17 years is a minimum, not a maximum for medical patents. You can get extensions for a variety of reasons & the big pharma companies often do.
2. If you let the bastards lock up everything for the next 17 years, the Chinese are going to put the U.S. of A. so far behind that it'll require a insane amounts of spending to catch up.
3. The public might need some of the innovations those ideas may generate between now and the year 2023.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sony just lost another court case relating to the vibration feedback on the dual shock joysitck.
(The claim is that the eccentric wheel is attached directly to the stick not the case and that this is novel because it gives feedback directly to the stick).
I found a patent that match exactly the same feature, same linkages, same thing, an eccentric shake feeback mechanism on a joystick on an aircraft simulator from Fokker in 1980's. Yet Sony just lost another case, even though its the same thing only smaller.
The court assume the patent office has done its job.
As long as the patent office doesn't enforce novelty and non-obviousness, the same patents will keep coming up again and again and again and the courts will enforce each new one.
Thousands of people in the third world die every day because western corporations deny them the right to manufacture patented drugs, and they can't afford to buy them at our prices.
There have also been cases where drugs have been made unavailable at any price, because the patent holder has refused to manufacture them or license the patents. For example, Mifepristone (RU-486) was kept off the US market for a while because the patent holder was unwilling to sell a politically incorrect drug in the USA, and it took a lot of pressure to get them to license the patent.
So I'm afraid if a patent prevented you from getting vital medical aid, you would simply be allowed to die. That's the way US capitalism works.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The relationship between physical things, such as B12 and some disease is not an invention, it is an observation. Thinking that there is a relationship is not licensed, and therefore cannot be held as private works. Proving the relationship is, more or less, like writing a book. Once you've written it, no one else can claim they did it first. That still doesn't give anyone the right to say no one else can use that relationship, even for the length of a patent.
... the list goes on.
Thoughts are not inventions, and patent law does not apply. The reason for patent laws was to allow those who acted on their thoughts first to use them for some gain. There has to be an 'invention' for any patent to be issuable, and a discovery of how nature works is not an invention, just as no one can patent 'air' or gravity, no one can patent the relationship between two things that happens in nature.
An example: Many thought of powered flight, but it was the Wright brothers who did it. There is a show on cable lately about how Star Trek created the modern world, or many of the technologies in it, yet the show's creators and writers do not have patents on things like the ion drive, or medical technologies. If this is not smacked down HARD, it will be science fiction writers who own the world in the next century, and they will not be friendly to big business IMO.
Mr. Clarke gave us communications satellites (IIRC) and other science fiction writers would have dibs on tons of things that big business just can't get their minds around yet, like say... talking computers? Mining technologies? cures for diseases?
Once that is pointed out to the lawyers I think it will all die the quick death of "That was a fscking bad idea, fire the guy who thought of that"....
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1. Patent the patent system 2. ??? 3. PROFIT!
Second, Crichton whines about the patents on the Hep-C virus genome. What he doesn't mention is for a decade no one managed to isolate Hep C virus or sequence its genome. Chiron took a big gamble and succeeded where everyone else had failed. If there were no patent rights in the offing, would we even have a Hepatitis C genome sequence to squabble over? This is a debatable question, but Chrichton is more interested in taking cheap shots than in substance. This is quite in character for him.
Finally, Crichton complains about people potentially patenting ways to end an essay, but perhaps he is so sensitive about this because he plagiarized the Afterword to State of Fear from Richard Lindzen. Crichton copies (without attribution) the thesis of Lindzen's 1985 essay, Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics. It's interesting that with all Crichton's footnotes and bilbiographic apparatus, he never references this essay or offers Lindzen credit for the ideas.
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I completely agree. I got into a major arguement earlier here on /. with a patent attorney over this very issue, and the conversation further convinced me of this concept.
Regardless of what endeavor of engineering I might participate in (and I do consider myself to be primarily an engineer), I fail to see any benefit at all to any kind of patent, including mechanical engineering... the classical example of patents.
I strongly consider patent attorneys to be simply fronts for a massive scam, and a modest revenue source for the U.S. Government. The expansion of patentable items is happening precisely because of the money that can be generated by this agency, which essentially pays for itself and even provides a modest surplus that doesn't need strict accounting, and can even be diverted to black ops if necessary. Talk about a conflict of interest on the part of the government here that is hearing the case.
Far too often I personnally know of people that have filed a patent, only to get themselves raked over the coals and have their "inventions" taken away anyway. A classical example is my grandfather, who patented about 30 different inventions and spent a minor fortune on attorney costs and filing fees for all that work. I think he got a total of about $2000 in royalties for all that work. One of his patents is explicitly cited as a fore-runner to Compact Discs (and subsequent technologies like the DVD) and developed encryption technologies that have been used by the NSA.
Unfortunately this is more of a typical example and not the exception. It is a very strong exception where a genuinely innovative concept is patented and a major company "buys" the patent and pays royalties to the inventor. Far too often a patent is filed strictly by a major company to protect themselves from any other idiot who also tries to file a competing patent that is subsequently accepted by the USPTO. The other use is to do a business negotiation where patents are "swapped", such as what happened with MPEG-4 and the DVD Forum (formerly the DVD Consortium).
The only practical benefit that I can see from patents right now is that they can preserve for future generations different techniques and manufacturing concepts, including assembly guidelines and how things are made. The problem with this attitude is that a typical patent application is so sparse that even somebody "learned in the art" can hardly recreate the patented process. They usually go into just enough detail to muddy the waters if there is an "infringement", and are so vague and interpreted so broadly by courts that you can't really even know if what you are doing violates a patent until after you have been slapped by a lawyer with a lawsuit.
Furthermore, engineers are explicitly told never to read any patents, under fear by management that they might "accidently" incorporate a patented idea into their design. So what is the real pratical benefit other than to keep a group of lawyers wealthy?
With the manner in which patents are granted with regard to medical advances, we are extremely lucky that such..."progress"...in the patent system did not occur any earlier.
Established facts are now restricted property to the point where you often cannot create a test that utilizes your own techniques and methods to check for the presence of a specific gene in a patient's body, because a biotech company has patented that gene and the very knowledge of what that gene does it patentable. I would argue that naturally occurring genetic material is the best example of prior art known to mankind, but the patent office disagrees and permits companies to claim parts of your body as their own, and declare that any knowledge of said material belongs to the company in question. If the biotech company's research establishes that a gene is responsible for a certain condition, using any means to test for that gene is infringement.
Imagine if you will, that years ago someone discovered that iron is hard and patented this exciting concept. We're not talking about a custom alloy or anything of that nature, but just pure iron. Since iron is naturally occurring people all across the globe can get their hands on it with some effort, but using the same broken standard that is currently being applied to patents in the United States today, the patent holder could sue every manufacturer and builder that used iron in any product or structure because they were operating on the belief that iron is a strong material useful for constructing things with, and thus, infringing on their intellectual property.
Where would we be today if such standards were applied in the past, and where will we be if we allow them to remain in force?
A patent can only be granted for a functional, functioning object. You can't get a patent for something that you haven't gotten to work yet. Otherwise, you could look at what people are researching, and patent what they're trying to get to work. Then, once they have made it work, you have the patent. Uh-huh. That dog won't hunt. Thus, JUST AS CRICHTON SAYS, the patent shouldn't have been granted.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Naah,
Just up the ante:
Anyone can submit a patent, for free.
If your patent is blocked because of prior art, or common sense, or any other reason other than in the name of governmental security, or if your patent is later overturned in a court of law for the same reasons, then you are shot on the spot.
I have a sneaky suspicion that the number of frivolous patents would greatly subside. After all no-one is going to submit a patent for a company that they don't think will stand.
-nB
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I beg to differ.
"1) Scientific principles are not patentable."
Ah, but that is a technical point which has long since been circumvented by the reality. For all practical purposes scientific principles have been patentable since at least the 80s (XOR anyone?)
"Obviously Mr. Crichton has not been informed of the "all elements" rule."
This presumes that hypothetical item number 7 is not, itself, a claim.
"The genes themselves are not owned. A "product of nature" - a naturally occurring substance discovered in the wild - may not be patented per se.
"However, a method for extracting, isolating, and purifying a gene may be patentable."
Ok, so he's correct. then. Why is this on your list if he's correct? Or were you just not counting the technicality (because I assure you that the courts and drug companies are!
"But keep in mind that patents only last for 20 years - so these patented methods will be publicly available for free in less than 20 years."
20 years... give or take possible renewal and the massive impact that 20 years can have on innovation. Oh, and the fact that duplicate patents are routinely issued.
"And others are still free to find other methods of extraction."
And yet, since vague claims are granted, other methods are likely to infringe.
"Certainly Mr. Crichton can afford an introductory class in patent law."
I'm not sure that's the case, but I am sure that innovation is in one of two modes everywhere that I look now: a slow, cautious crawl, in an attempt to avoid getting sued; or a rapid, but questionable pace of innovating on top of IP that isn't owned by the innovator (e.g. open source software).
No, folks, this is not an abberrant perversion of law or politics. This is the true purpose, as intended, of IP. Utter and total control of information, including thoughts, basic arithmetics, integer numbers and lanugage constructs. Because, as I kept explaining over and over, all of these are mere forms and facets of the same thing: information. And once you allow "ownership", however illogical that idea is, of information, the rest simply follows from there.
To its inevietable consequences.
Cause and effect. It is as simple as that.
This country is going to have to come to a serious reckoning very soon on the subject of Intellectual Property. I may be annoyed by HBO threatening to sue me over shifting a few bits around the network, but there are things far worse. My mother recently had her gall bladder removed. But what if her doctor had not been able to tell her the result of the test to determine that because someone else held a patent on that diagnosis? I do understand the need for patents. It is entirely reasonable to protect an idea long enough for a company to produce a product and start making money. However, when a company can file patents and put them in a drawer waiting to sue someone who actually figures out how to implement them ( NPT vs. Blackberry); Microsoft can patent "A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon; assigning a character sequence to the pixels; and transmitting the character sequence to a destination to allow for reconstruction of the pixels at the destination" (Smiley Face Patent); and, as mentioned in Crichton's article, a company can patent a link between elevated homocysteine levels and vitamin deficiency, something needs to be done.