Come on people. This point has been made again and again throughout this thread. First of all, Skylarov did not violate the law. His company did when they sold the product in the US. Any entity that conducts business in the US is subject to US law. It's just as simple as that. If you all of a sudden decide to sell some product in another country, I would suggest checking up on the laws of that country to determine whether or not your product is illegal there.
That said, the only issue people should be mad about here (other than the fact that the law is crap in this case), is that they were able to arrest a guy just to testify against his employer.
This interpretation potentially disallows all patents on future gene therapies, potentially genetically modified crops, and even down to the level of bacterial engineering for anything from drug production to oil eating bacteria to scavenge oil spills.
That is not entirely true. They said "higher life form." So I don't think we need to worry about oil-eating bacteria, or even the broccoflower for that matter.
I know we are getting off topic here, but this -2 stuff is definitely a hoax. It even says so elsewhere on that web site. Some sort of April Fool's joke or something. Here is the link:
http://www.smbhq.com/new.htm
Scroll about a third of the way down and read the message for 4/3/02.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on people. This point has been made again and again throughout this thread. First of all, Skylarov did not violate the law. His company did when they sold the product in the US. Any entity that conducts business in the US is subject to US law. It's just as simple as that. If you all of a sudden decide to sell some product in another country, I would suggest checking up on the laws of that country to determine whether or not your product is illegal there.
That said, the only issue people should be mad about here (other than the fact that the law is crap in this case), is that they were able to arrest a guy just to testify against his employer.
This interpretation potentially disallows all patents on future gene therapies, potentially genetically modified crops, and even down to the level of bacterial engineering for anything from drug production to oil eating bacteria to scavenge oil spills.
That is not entirely true. They said "higher life form." So I don't think we need to worry about oil-eating bacteria, or even the broccoflower for that matter.
I know we are getting off topic here, but this -2 stuff is definitely a hoax. It even says so elsewhere on that web site. Some sort of April Fool's joke or something. Here is the link: http://www.smbhq.com/new.htm Scroll about a third of the way down and read the message for 4/3/02.