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New Patent Treaty
Alan Cox was kind enough to inform us of a new patent treaty proposed by the World Trade Organization. This Channel 4 news story shows the indirect effect on the cocoa industry. The agreement, Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the text of which can be read here, allows virtually anything, including genes to be patented. The possible ramifications of this are huge, and it raises plenty of questions about concepts of "intellectual property".
US Constitution: Article VI, Section 2: (retyped, forgive typos)
This Consitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Consitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwistanding.
The relative phrase is "...Constitution or Laws of any State..."
That is state constitution, or state laws.
If I'm wrong: Smack me down, but I think this is a common misconception. Treaties do not override the Federal Constitution.
Pax -- Ob
Scene at WTO meeting:
"Hey, man, have you tried this new joint we've bio-engineered? It gives you a different trip in each hemisphere. It's to promote our new patent scheme, TRIPS."
Seriously, the more the rest of society moves away from Intellectual Property and towards free exchange of ideas, the more the multinationals are determined to grab what money they can.
Those who complain about Big Government should stop and think for a moment. Politicians are just plebs, like the rest of us, and at least they can be voted out. There's no ballot box in any of the megacorps, no maximum term of office and no real accountability. (They're accountable to shareholders, sure, but shareholders profit from dodgy, unethical or blatantly illegal practices. You think they're going to complain too loudly?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Mars corporation identified and patented the genes responsible for the flavour and design a process to produce the flavour industrially, independent of growing cocoa.
The result of course is that people will stop buying cocoa from Ghana and instead buy the Ghanaian cocoa flavouring from Mars. So the Ghanaians who spent generations developing the best cocoa in the world are screwed, and the Mars corp makes a packet. And TRIPS means that Ghana HAS to honour the Mars corps patent.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
--
Coincidentally, the WTO is meeting this week in Seattle. Environmentalists (ranging from Sierra Club to Earth First'ers), people of color, labor, consumer advocates, churches, and even groups as specific as Tibetan rights advocates are coming out to protest. A group of my friends are bussing out from Minnesota just for the big protest tomorrow (Tues), then heading back home. Aiiee! That's 1500 miles!
:) that will join the march en route.
My questions -- where's the geek contingent? Since patents are the bane of free software, we should be out there with our own supporting contingent too.
For people in the Seattle area, there's going to be some forums on this TRIPs agreement. I know Ralph Nader's going to be in town for a WTO debate, and I believe he'll be speaking at one of these forums too.
Here's the scoop on this forum series:
No Patents on Life: A Workshop on Biotechnology, Intellectual Property and the Global Economy
Wed, Dec 1, 9:00am-5:00pm Plymouth Congregational Church, 6th and University
Phone: (206) 543-9037
And, of course, come out for the protest! Remember, Tuesday is General Strike day in Seattle. Call in sick, or better yet, have your boss call in Sick too!
Event info is in both of the weeklies (Stranger and Seattle Weekly). You can also stop by the DAN headquarters on the corner of Denny and Olive to get involved with the fun contingent (puppets, civil disobedience, and the like).
The big rally starts tomorrow (Tues) at 10am at Memorial Stadium, with the big march afterwards to the Convention Center at 12:30pm. There's also lots of contingents meeting earlier (eg the DAN contingent is meeting at 7am -- too early for me
Geeks of the world unite! The only we have to lose is our IP and NDA's.
I think it's clear that gene sequences extracted from organisms are not intelectual property. They are finings of nature. Either way, couldn't prior art be demonstrated simply by showing that some organism used the gene sequence before it was patented? How can a company patent genes for enzymes which our bodies have produced for thousands of years? These are clearly not creations of the mind, and thus not intelectual property.
...Linux!
Although, if a company does come up with a new and truly unique gene sequence, not found in nature, then it would be a creation of the mind. This would qualify as intelectual property, and could then be patented. I don't know of any cases of this yet. So far all genetic information comes from the genomes of organisms, we don't have a sophisticated enough understanding of genetic information systems to generate new and usedful genetic sequences.
Andrew N.
--
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
"THIS PUBLICATION IS THE KEY TO INCREASING SPEED OF TECHNOLOGY PROGRESS. Without the patent system this publication would not take place."
Where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique? You can gain no monetary income since it is patented by another. In fact, your impovement will be added onto thier own for thier profit.
I really do want to know where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique?
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
There is a stealthy organisation called JUSCANZ (Japan, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which lobbies for rich businesses against the environment whenever they can. If you haven't heard about them, you are not the only one. Check out this URL for more information.
http://www.igc.org/climate/1.c1.juscanz.html
************************************************ ***
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
But, it's not fair.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
In the US, foreign knowledge, use and invention are all excluded when ``prior art'' is considered in relation to a US patent application.
If that's true, then surely US Patents can have no legal validity whatsoever outside the US, with or without the WTO. But then, how can a patent on a cocoa gene taken out by a US company be used against farmers in Ghana?
Either I'm missing something important or else there is a massive inconsistency here. It ought to be a simple matter for each national government to make its own decision about whether to accept or refuse the legal validity of US patents. I had thought these were only recognised when there was some sort of reciprocal arrangement. But the situation you describe doesn't look very reciprocal.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You'd be hard pressed to find any natural varieties in cash crops. Cross breading is little different from genetic engineering...
But that's it precisely. Would mankind ever have risen out of a nomadic lifestyle if we had been prevented from developing arable crops and domesticated animals? Agriculture would have been impossible and as a result we would never have become civilised; we would still be grubbing about in the dirt for roots, worms and bugs.
If this agreement would take away the right of millions of people to continue a natural, traditional and sustainable means of feeding themselves which they have practised for thousands of years, then it is hideously, unjustifiably wrong no matter who else stands to gain.
And if, in addition, it is deemed essential only to protect the biotechnology industry (which hasn't been around for long and doesn't affect all that many people), then the biotechnology industry is clearly unsustainable and should be abandoned.
This nonsense must be stopped now. I'm sorry, I'm just too choked up about this, there don't seem to be any adequate words to describe my fury.
If this goes through I'll buy no more products from Mars. I don't want to eat genetically modified food anyway, and especially if doing so takes business away from subsistence farmers in poor countries.
Of course the Ghanaian farmer quoted in the article is obviously not a subsistence farmer; he's in the report because he's royalty, he's educated and articulate in English. But cocoa accounts for a major portion of Ghana's exports and many poor farmers grow it. If they lose control of their own plant stock it will be an unmitigated disaster.
BTW I've known a few Ghanaians (all Ashante) and I have the utmost respect for them. They are a truly decent and honourable people (I know it's non-PC to say things like that but then...I'm a non-PC kind of guy). However this isn't just about Ghana. Greedy corporations are attempting to pull the same trick all over the third world.
Vote with your pocket. Buy all the African and Asian produce you can, but buy it raw, not prepackaged by the big multinational corporations. Now I'm off to write a vitriolic email to Mars corp.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Very good point. We should not be in an uproar because this is new. We should be in an uproar because it is such a tremendous threat to innovation and individual inventiveness. And, perhaps, we should be in an uproar because this wasn't brought to our attention earlier (or, if it was, we weren't listening very well).
In any event, the TRIPS agreement, what it represents, and what it will do to innovation, is deserving of a tremendous uproar, whatever the underly catalyst.
One hopes that resistance hasn't become futile because of its belatedness.
One also wonders how one mounts effective resistence to international bodies of power with absolutely no democratic accountability and such tremendous authority, backed by the armed might of entire international alliances.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The most obvious deviation that I see is that it requires compilation/database copyrights, something that raises serious concerns for science and other public areas of discourse. It also seems quite unrelated to free trade issues and far beyond the scope of the WTO.
As I read the summary, TRIPS allows the exclusion of many kinds of life forms from patentability. Although this is to be welcomed, it should give us pause to think that the document seems to assume that the WTO, in fact, has the authority to make sweeping decisions in this area.
TRIPS does seem to write into stone a 20 year minimum for patent protection, making any discussions of shortening patent protection for software moot.
I think even thought TRIPS is less serious than it could have been, it pretty clearly goes into a direction that is desired primarily by large multinational corporations, even though many of its provisions are not desired and have actually failed passage in WTO member countries. As such, it is another indication that WTO is far removed from the democratic accountabilities and decision processes by which we set social and economic policies.
TRIPS also looks like an attempt to bring developing countries into line that, so far, have had valid concerns about adopting and enforcing the IP laws of developed countries wholesale.
The WTO looks like a gigantic social and political experiment to me; free trade and global uniformity of regulations has never been tried on that kind of scale. I think slowing down and making the organization more accountable would be good.
As was pointed out above, the site seemed slashdotted, or just really slow and i lost patience. Either way, I couldn't read the text.
:) antiquated and out of touch with today's realitys. But in the end, whoever funds the research into a project definetly should be first in line to reap the monetary rewards.
Continuing, what would be so terribly wrong about letting companies and/or individuals patent their MODIFICATIONS to DNA structures. That way, the naturally occuring version would always be "free", and the modified version would always "cost" in a sense.
I'll go on the record as saying I'm all for patents and other IP protections, but I do think that the current system is (a tad bit
The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work.
True, but this has nothing to do with the current topic.
The reality of the situation is that we're going farther and farther overboard. The USPTO is issuing overbroad patents by the thousand. It's quickly reaching the point where it's impossible to do anything without a (large) team of patent lawyers continuously sifting through the stream of shit^H^H^H^Hpatents that flows down from the government to see which of them apply to whatever it is that you're trying to do (or have been doing for years).
In many ways, a return to the 18th century, pre-patent concept of trade secrets would be a welcome change. At least if something's "merely" a trade secret instead of a government-enforced patented idea, you can still use it! If you happen to invent something that's a trade secret of GM or Monsanto, then you get to use it in your own products. If you happen to invent something that's patented, though, you get a nasty lawsuit regardless of whether you even knew there was such a patent.
Analysis on Slashdot will do little to change anything, unless there's a bit of activism to go along with it.
There are a number of organizations in existence who apparently work on some aspect or another of intellectual property rights. An incomplete list (with links) can be found here. A cursory look makes me think that Union for the Public Domain is promising (though moving slowly) as an organization moving the right direction.
Anyone know of any others? Or, should another one be necessary? There needs to be someway to focus resources on this matter...
Tweet, tweet.
Intellectual property rights are the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds.
This is the very first line of the WTO's definition of intellectual property. It's also inconsistent with every attempt to patent, for example, cocoa chemicals.
Actually, history offers much stronger support of my contention than it does of yours (recall, for example, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper
The inventor of the intermittant windshield wiper is now a very rich man. It took a while, but he was successful in pursuing his case. This example, in fact is a good argument in favor of the patent system.
Another example is any industry in countries which have a, shall we say, less than optimal (in the West's eyes) enforcement policy of patents. Those industries produce and improve upon products, despite the fact that their improvements will also be "stolen" and copied by others. Odd, that these industries thrive so well without any significant "protection" through patents, isn't it?
Yes, let's look at these nations. Malaysia. Indonesia. Pakistan. China. They way these countries improve their internal technologies is by sending their best and brightest to western graduate schools and by reading western literature or hiring western experts as consultants. It is clearly in their interest to ignore patents because they in fact have nothing to lose and much to gain through importing technologies from the west. No single nation with a strong technology infrastructure is without a good patent system. The fact is that the nations without a good patent system have no significant home developed technologies.
you are very incorrect to imply that the patenting system actually encourages technological development, and that it would not occur without it.
Where did I say that innovation would not occur without patents? It clearly would. However without patents the innovation would be kept secret either by legal means or by obfuscation rather than be published. THIS PUBLICATION IS THE KEY TO INCREASING SPEED OF TECHNOLOGY PROGRESS. Without the patent system this publication would not take place.
Whether or not a patent is issued, a company will produce a product if it feels it can make a profit on it. It will do so, even knowing that foreign competitors will copy and sell the product,
True enough - BUT the DEVELOPMENT of new products is usually colored by the issue of patentability. XYZ Inc. is NOT going to sink $500 million in R&D into an improved Frammis if it thought that it would be quickly copied and give no advantage in the market. Product profitability in fact is what drives many R&D efforts, and without the assurance of exclusivity the profits necessary to justify the development costs are just not there. Without patents industrial R&D spending would decline in the US to 20% of it's current levels. It would be in fact a total unmitigated disaster to technological progress any this country that abandoned patents.
With modern reverse engineering techniques
Modern reverse engineering techniques do not prevent companies from maintaining secrets in a number of ways. For example, in the chemical and the software industries many products are sold accompanied by licenses that prevent the buyer from applying these techniques to the product they purchase. The is in fact kept secret by these legal mechanisms.
In addition modern reverse engineering techniques are far from omniscient. They do not determine the manufacturing process, only the end result. A large percentage of the most valuable patents cover such processes, which are often key to achieving high purity or low cost. This process are in fact easy to keep secret because they are practiced only by the manufacturer. Trying to reconstruct the process used from an analysis of the final material can be essentially impossible.
In order to obtain a patent you must disclose the best way known to implement your invention. Consider how much R&D effort would be wasted in reverse engineering and re-invention of technology without this publication of these results within the patent framework.
No, the FACT of the matter is that patent systems have a 300 year long record of success in stimulating technological development. You can argue all you want, but what you are proposing is counter to all historical evidence and would lead to a near-total evisceration of all industrial technological research and development.
The larger picture (much slower technological growth, squandering of the intellectual capacity of humankind by limiting what we're allowed to invent because of patents which have already closed off access to the concepts and ideas, etc.) means little when the primary, indeed in most cases the only, goal is immediate profit. It is here that the profit motive truly does break down and begin to cause significant harm to society as a whole.
Nicely worded, but completely wrong. The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work. This practice of keeping everything possible a close secret is in fact what patent law was designed to abolish in the early 18th century. The key thing to remember about patents is that a patent is a contract between the inventor and the government; the government grants an exclusive right to practice an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for the full and public disclosure of the invention.
In addition to the disclosure requirements patent laws have specific exemptions allowing the subject matter inventions to be used for research purposes free of infringement. Thus patents STIMULATE new research by encouraging the free flow of information. In addition requirements that patents be applied for in a 'timely' fashion results in relatively QUICK publication of the invention.
Patents were in fact devised for the purpose of enabling research and development through the free flow of information that would otherwise be kept secret for commercial reasons. In fact Research and Development is aided tremendously by the existence of a good patent system by both insuring publication of the technology, and by insuring the inventor (or the organization funding the inventor) obtains economic benefits from the development of new technologies.
The language and regulations contained in TRIPS is old news. The prospect of having the enforcement power of the WTO behind this agreement is definitely not old news; it is going on right now, here in Seattle.
The WTO's power lies in imposing punitive tariffs on countries that flaunt its rules. No country can afford to stand up to them for long.
So, do I think that governments should be able to flaunt treaties that they've signed? I'd like to be able to say "Yes, if the treaties suck", but that's the easy way out. The real question is, who interprets the treaties, and in the last resort, who decides if the treaty has come into conflict with some right more fundamental than it. If you understand your local justice system, you know who's making those choices when treaties are enforced by the governments that sign them.
With the WTO, you might imagine that there's some impartial body adhering to the letter and spirit of the treaty, in this case TRIPS. No way. WTO decisions are made in secret by 3-judge panels. The panelists have almost universally been corporate lawyers at some point in their past. The panel absolutely refuses to hear testimony from anyone but corporations and governments, as you can read about in this leaked ruling. The results are predictable: not once has the WTO ruled in favor of a local law. When you look at it like this, you see the WTO for what it is: not just a way of enforcing treaties, but an unprecedented power-grab by corporations.
So when you read TRIPS, don't read it as a neutral document that will be judiciously enforced. Try reading between the lines, stretching every phrase to its ultimate limit in favor of the big guys. Imagine, at the very least, a whole new set of legal fees to keep the individual patent-holder (or any future "GNU free-patent" organization) out of the game entirely. Then decide what you think of this latest news.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
IIRC, international treaties also amend the Constitution or at least have the same authoritye. I hate treaties like this because I know that the public good is the furthest thing from the writers mind. And, unfortunately, paying attention to these subjects is the furthest thing from the public's mind at large. The only people paying attention are those that can profit from the situation, and, most likely, they are paying a lot more than just attention.
+&x
and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land
I didn't say it "overrode" the Constitution, I said it "amended" it.
By standardizing things like IP law in international treaties you can dismiss that whole "public good" idea. You also miss things like "media attention" and "public outrage." How many people know Disney lobbied Congress to change the law directly to serve their interests?
+&x
I'm not sure how much of it is based on the same IP issues that we get all hot and bothered about, but there's an article at CNN with info about a rather large protest occuring at the WTO meeting in seattle.
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
TRIPS is seriously old news. It was the result of extended negotiations and public debate over a period of years beginning in the early 1990's (and some time before then), and was ultimately adopted in January of 1995. These terms were negotiated in part through the USTR, then Mickey Kantor (sp?) and the USPTO Commissioner, Bruce Lehman, neither of whom are still in office.
As with most trade agreements, there can be found within it some good and some bad. But whatever else can be said about TRIPS, the issues raised there are not new ones. Moreover, to the extent that we have been signed on since the mid-90's, its sort of a done deal.
Your first point - worldwide agreement on what consitutes a patentable(sic) invention - is the most important issue.
Patents being more of an issue in software because things are developed more quickly is irrelevant. If things are developed more quickly, the original patent should soon become redundant. Its validity for an extended time period would be meaningless. A catalogue of ridiculous software patents is available at the LPF site. Many of these are quite old and still causing untold harm.
The most pernicious thing about this sort of idiocy is what it potentially does to the likes of us. Big companies can afford to take out speculative patents on any computing technique which looks in the least promising. The fact that these patents would be struck down as prior art if challenged is irrelevent to them because they know that small companies and individuals cannot afford to mount challenges.
This really is one for your political representative. If this gets to stand, all open source software (and all small software companies) are dead.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
exerpt:
2. Members may exclude from patentability inventions, the prevention within their territory of the commercial exploitation of which is necessary to protect ordre public or morality, including to protect human, animal or plant life or health or to avoid serious prejudice to the environment, provided that such exclusion is not made merely because the exploitation is prohibited by their law.
3. Members may also exclude from patentability:
(a) diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical methods for the treatment of humans or animals;
(b) plants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and microbiological processes. However, Members shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof. The provisions of this subparagraph shall be reviewed four years after the date of entry into force of the WTO Agreement.
It seems like the main priniciple behind it is to allow the patent of plant life that has been genetically engineered... which I don't see a problem with, although I do agree with a previous poster that the method should be patentable but not the gene.
That is the way it works with computer programs, you can patent the method but not the result, although you can place a copyright on the code itself.
There are also obvious exemptions for medical technology which, as long as they remain in place, are a good thing.
Find out why, visit any of the following:
m l 4 -98/seaturtle.htm
http://www.greenpeace.org/politics/wto/index.ht
http://www.agp.org/agp/index.html
http://www.tradewatch.org/gattwto/gatthome.html
http://www.uaw.org/breaktime/news_to_you/news2u
http://www.etan.ca/news/etanott.5.19.98.html
The WTO is against trade sanctions that protect democracy, the environment, and apartate. They use psudo-science from the labs of corp funded research, blah, blah, blah, I am not an expert on it, but I've noticed it popping up again and again in news about the environment, freedom of speach, and on and on and on...
Thad
The patenting of genes seems to me a tricky issue. I agree that some sort of protection is needed if biotech companies are to gain anything (monetarily) from their time investment into engineering crops for the benefit of consumers. But how far can a company go? What happens when someone tries to patent, say, the grape? How specific does the patent need to be?
Patents exist to protect our intellectual property. Naturally, you should not be able to patent almost snything, because that would then broaden and obfuscate (the already obfuscated) debate about what constitutes intellectual property. If you invent something new, you have the right to claim that technology so nobody else can "steal" your intellectual property, in much the same way that you can copyright written text.
The problem with using patents with genetics is that no one can claim to have 'invented' the gene for chocolatiness (my term - I'm sure Nature wouldn't accept it). Mars (in this case) isolated a gene that is a fluke of evolution - its not the same thing at all.
If patents are to be granted on life forms it could freeze the developing nations of the World out of the market for their own biodiversity. Most of the World's lifeforms are found in the Tropics where many of the poorest countries are sited. We're already seeing Western biotech companies patenting genes and therapies based on plants and animals found in developing nations. none of the money goes back to these countries or even to protecting their environment.
It's time the patenting of organisms and their genes was banned. The biotech companeis got into the market without the protection of patents, let's see them survive without them. As the UK government used to say when it was selling us something we already owned 'The values of your shares may go down as well as up'. Besides, if it means that companies as corrupt and arrogant as Monsanto and Novartis go to the wall all the better.
More immediately on the cocoa issue, the WTO should immediately review its policies on the export of cocoa products. At the Uruguay Round of talks, the tarriffs on raw cocoa were dropped to almost nothing (not a problem for the West which doesn't produce cocoa), but those on processed cocoa were kept at a high level. As a result, the producing countries have to pay high tarriffs when exporting chocolate and chocolate products to the Western markets; their products can't compete and the cocoa producers can't get a share of these high-value markets for chocolate.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The topics are something we should be concerned about, but we should not get in an uproar because this is something new, because it's not.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The big genetic companies, seeing the possibility
of patents on DNA being made impossible by
legislation, cleverly decide to get the WTO to
start up talk about new patent rules explicitly
allowing genetic patents, so the US would look
backward (or like a loose cannon) if it were to
ban genetic patents. Pretty clever, and certainly
not in our best interests..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Patents exist to protect our intellectual property.
No. Patents (and copyrights) exist to promote the progress of science and useful arts (clause 8) (non-Americans may substitute their own national references).
What needs to be thought is this treaty - specifically what can and cannot be considered new technology that is patent-worthy.
Yes. That's definitely something that needs to be revised.
But I'm also concerned about what this treaty means in other ways. If I understand this correctly, the treaty basically aims to force every nation to recognize patents from other nations.
If this were to happen, it would spell disaster for a lot of free software, and for the economies of many third-world countries. Consider the example of RSA encryption -- since the RSA algorithm is patented in the United States, American cryptographers cannot write code using that algorithm (unless they obtain a "license"). So anybody who wants to sell an RSA-based product has to base their business in Australia or some other country -- and even then they probably still can't sell to the United States. The situation is even worse for free software, because while a commercial organization may be able to pay the "license fees" to use the patented algorithm, no free software project will be able to do that.
So, what happens if Australia is forced to honor the American patent on RSA? All of the RSA development that moved to Australia to escape the patent is screwed. And if every country honors the patent, then the project is essentially terminated, because there will be no escape from the IP police.
Also think about what this means to Australia (or any other country) -- the commercial organizations who moved their business to Australia probably gave a nice little boost to the local econonmy. If they can't continue their business, then Australia's economy takes a hit.
I think this proposed treaty is a bad idea.
As for WTO, I'm quickly developing a chronic dislike for it. It only serves the interests of the big players - countries, companies.. Who cares what happens to the rest.
In general I think that world-wide agreement on what constitutes a patentable invention is a good thing. In Europe for example there are provisions that allow people to contest a patent before it is issued (something that would kill a lot of the stuff with obvious prior art that gets issued in the US).
Of course the stuff about genes is dubious public policy, but I think that patenting genes in the long run isn't going to make much difference. It is going to take a long time to go from a gene to a product based on that gene, and patents have a 20 year lifetime. After the patent is up, it's all back in the public domain.
Patent terms are much more of an issue in software where things are developed much more quickly than in biotech.
The point is, the issue that needs to be resolved here is not whether there should exist a worldwide patenting office, but what the new, techno-savvy definition of intellectual property should be. That would make a far more interesting debate, I think
Nicely worded, but completely wrong. The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work. This practice of keeping everything possible a close secret is in fact what patent law was designed to abolish in the early 18th century.
Actually, history offers much stronger support of my contention than it does of yours (recall, for example, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, the numerous inventors who had their ideas. and rights to said ideas, stolen by Thomas Edisson, etc. etc. etc.).
While you are correct in that the original purpose of patent law was to insure that new ideas be published and thereby the knowledge not lost, you are very incorrect to imply that the patenting system actually encourages technological development, and that it would not occur without it.
Whether or not a patent is issued, a company will produce a product if it feels it can make a profit on it. It will do so, even knowing that foreign competitors will copy and sell the product, though of course it will cry foul at the prospect (who wouldn't). A good example of this is the software industry, which thrived in the US without patents for quite some time and thrives outside the US in places without software patents, despite the ease with which not only their ideas, but their very products, can and are copied by others. Not only have patents proven to be unnecessary to the prosperity of the software industry, they have been very destructive to progress in the industry in recent years. Worse, they have had absolutely no effect on limiting the kind of copying (of ideas, algorithms, or even product) which they purport to protect the "inventor" against.
Another example is any industry in countries which have a, shall we say, less than optimal (in the West's eyes) enforcement policy of patents. Those industries produce and improve upon products, despite the fact that their improvements will also be "stolen" and copied by others. Odd, that these industries thrive so well without any significant "protection" through patents, isn't it?
Similarly negative effects on innovation and related problems to those suffered by the software industry arise in other fields such a biotechnology and even traditionally patent-friendly fields such as automotive engineering. The negative ramifications are merely less evident to the casual observer, though if you give it some thought, you'll think of numerous examples where either the technology itself was stifled or even suppressed (e.g. hydrogen burning motors, etc.) or the inventor was not only not protected, but actually victimized by the patenting system (intermittent windshield wipers, etc). Even in areas where few of us question the concept of patents one can, with only a little observation, see the active and ongoing harm that the patenting system has on the industry and the stifling effect it has on technological innovation.
With modern reverse engineering techniques (which until very recently were legal in the US, and still are legal most other places) the actual publishing of patented information is much less of an issue than the stifling effect a government sanctioned monopoly on ideas has. By expanding this to software, genetics, mathetmatics, and numerous other fields of scientific endeavor this negative impact will become greater. As past progress in these areas shows, patents are not only not needed, but detrimental.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This is a terrible development. Clearly Corporate Earth (i.e. international corporations and big business) is able to have a much greater impact on international agendas and accords than any (other) constituents. Alas, it matters little to such entities that the exponential progress in technology and human knowledge to which we have grown acustomed could be severely curtailed by such draconian privatization of knowledge and so-called intellectual property. What is far more important to them are their short (and to a lesser degree) medium term profits. The larger picture (much slower technological growth, squandering of the intellectual capacity of humankind by limiting what we're allowed to invent because of patents which have already closed off access to the concepts and ideas, etc.) means little when the primary, indeed in most cases the only, goal is immediate profit. It is here that the profit motive truly does break down and begin to cause significant harm to society as a whole.
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I can only see three possible outcomes of this, one of which is unthinkable, one merely bad, and only one good.
(The Good News First)
1) This could wake people up, and perhaps lead to reform in the entire patenting process (extremely unlikely IMHO)
2) There could be some resisitence, resulting in compromises which result in worldwide patents extending to broader areas than are currently permitted, but not "everything." This would be bad -- things are bad enough now, but if there is no where in the world for progress to be made when absurd patents are, say, granted by the US Patent Office, then the stifling effect of patents will become far more acute and immediate. Still, things could be much worse
3) The proposal could go through largely unchanged, resulting in a draconian, world-wide net of patent law which stifles and ultimately kills most innovation, except that by large corporate entities which can afford licensing fees or leverage their existing patent portfolios. The result would almost certainly be a dramatic slow-down of technological progress on nearly every front, as any promising research idea or direction is fenced off by numerous patent applications, most of which, given the recent history of the US Patent Office, would probably be granted.
More insidiously, the individual would be cut off from taking any significant part in any technological developments, except as an employee or lackey of some large firm. This could result in the very best minds simply losing interest in persuing any field of endeavor where their ability to invent and achieve has been so severely limited before the fact, resulting in a shrinking intellectual pool of (active) talent from which even the largest and best financed corporations could benefit. The potential damage to Universities and other open scientific forums for research doesn't bear thinking about.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Now however, we extend this to genes, enzymes and who knows what else. So all of a sudden, it may be possible for an enterprise to own what may be basic building blocks of life or gene sequences that (may or may not) determine your intelligence, (at least partially) your character and all sorts of fancy stuff. This IMNSHO is just not acceptible. Each of us (and just about every living thing may) carry this stuff around with us and have been doing so since long before we ever heard the words IP lawyer ... I don't think any company ought to be able to own this kind of stuff ... this should be released to the public domain so anybody who cares to has access to it; sort of like electricity ...
What happens 20 years down the road if someone actually finds (and patents) a gene sequence which improves intelligence? Would I, as a reasonably intelligent guy, own them royalties?? You know eventually business will try to do this. For many kinds on patents the proper (wishful) thinking may just be that old proverb (that already failed once miserably): Just Say No!
Of course you are free to sayt "Just say no", but who's gonna listen to you?? And what about the other 5billion+ people who just don't know or care?