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Supreme Court Legitimizing Medical Patents?
RobinEggs writes "A case before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday addressed the legality of medical patents. From the article: 'The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient's blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical "indicate a need" to raise or lower the drug dosage. The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn't act on the patent's recommendations.'"
This is as basic as it gets. Can companies patent the use of facts? Let's see if they can get this right. If they do, at least we know there's an upper limit to their ignorance.
Yes, clearly "Woofy Goofy" knows more about the law than the Supreme Court.
Now when you say "intentionally planted"; what you mean is that the farmer took his only seeds; the ones which were contaminated; and then planted them.
NO. Exnay on the orrect ceh. Complete bucking fullshit. If that were the case, there would have been no issue.
No, the problem here is that the farmers involved intentionally selected for GM plants. It's not just a case of accidentally planting some seeds that got mixed in with the regular crop - it's them looking for the GM seeds and planting them in favor of the "normal" ones.
To make an analogy - drinking water contains trace amounts of cyanide. You will not go to jail for giving someone a glass of water. You will go to jail if you give someone a glass of water which you've repeatedly filtered to increase the cyanide concentration to lethal levels.