European Court of Justice Rejects Stem-Cell Patents

ianare writes "The European Court of Justice Friday issued a preliminary opinion that procedures involving human embryonic stem cells are not patentable — even if the process in question does not involve the direct destruction of embryos — because they are tantamount to making industrial use of human embryos, which 'would be contrary to ethics and public policy.'"

Comments

Re:Patents should not be about ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I don't think ethics should play a role in what is patentable.

Then you don't understand the nature of ethics. Ethics play a role in everything we do, even by their absence.
I'm sure that some would argue that the ethical requirement on a court is to apply simple objective tests that would reach a different conclusion to this, but that's very different from saying that ethics don't apply.

right answer wrong reason

[chichilalescu]

as far as I understand it, the point of patents is to allow inventors to profit from their invention even though it's not an industrial secret. the community can benefit from understanding why the invention works, and the inventor gets back their investment, plus profit.
there are a lot of problems with this system at the moment, because too many things are getting patented.
there are a lot of cases where several researchers concentrate on some given problem, they publish intermediary results, and it is predictable that within some time frame most specialists will arrive at the same solution. however, only the first one to find the final result (or the first one to file for the patent) is awarded the patent. this is wrong in my view, because there is an entire community working in that direction.
in medicine, I'm pretty confident this is the general case, and pretty much the reason there are several different but similar drugs dealing with the same medical problems.

basically, I think patents should only be granted to individual researchers who can prove they developped a concept (on their own) based on widely available information. anything other than that is just simple research, and should be rewarded with grants or prizes by private persons/organisations, but not with a patent. "ethics" and religion should have nothing to do with patentability.