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[News] More Proof That Intellectual Monopolies (Patents) and Ethically Corrupt

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US Green Patents vs. Global Climate Commons

,----[ Quote ]
| Guess which wins?
| 
|     Last night the House voted overwhelmingly to establish new U.S. policy 
|     that will oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP 
|     rights of American "green technology."  
| 
| Staggering. Sickening. Suicidal. (Via Against Monopoly.)
`----

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-green-patents-vs-global-climate.html

Intellectual “Property” Versus Real Property 

,----[ Quote ]
| Intellectual “property” (IP) is a sleeper issue. It seems uncontroversial: 
| Someone invents or writes something and therefore owns it. What could be 
| plainer? But IP contains the power to destroy liberty.  
| 
| IP isn’t merely about rock bands preventing kids from sharing MP3s over the 
| Internet. (See “Weird Al” Yankovic’s musical commentary, “Don’t Download This 
| Song,” here.) It’s about crusty incumbent firms trying to preserve market 
| share by stifling competition, domestically and in the developing world.   
`----

http://fee.org/articles/tgif/intellectual-property/

Get Your Hands Out of my Genes!

,----[ Quote ]
| Our genes might be practically open to discovery, there's very little 
| physically I can do to prevent you from acquiring my genes and unraveling my 
| genetic code. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be disturbing or unethical if 
| you did this. The knowledge you could get about me, and use against me, is 
| just too potentially disruptive to decide that we are not somehow each 
| custodians, and maybe even more properly guardians, of our individual genetic 
| data.      
| 
| At the same time, the genome we share cannot be cordoned off. To the degree 
| that our genetic information is mostly the same, we should all have access to 
| it. No one should be able to claim that if we want to peek around, learn some 
| more, and do some studies on this common genetic code, we somehow have to pay 
| for this. Our "common genetic heritage" is, I argue, an actual commons like 
| the sky, sunlight, or international waters. We should treat it as such.     
`----

http://whoownsyou-drkoepsell.blogspot.com/2009/06/keep-your-eyes-off-my-genes.html


Recent:

Another Example Of Patents Putting Lives At Risk

,----[ Quote ]
| Given that Shafer refused to live up to the terms of the deal that he had
| never agreed to in the first place, ABL moved forward and sued Shafer
| directly, and that case is now ongoing -- even as Shafer hopes to invalidate
| the patent through the Patent Office itself. The whole thing is yet another
| story of how patents are being used to stifle innovation -- and sometimes put
| lives at risk. It's tragic that we've been seeing so many such stories
| lately.
`----

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090610/2202565196.shtml


harmfulpatents.org

,----[ Quote ]
| More than 20 years after medical expert systems were first developed, the
| USPTO issued two patents simply on the concept of using a computer to help
| physicians choose medical treatments. A company that purchased these patents
| claims that "the diagnosis and treatment of most chronic diseases will fall
| under the claims of these patents." Already it has filed patent infringement
| suits against seven companies in three years and it threatened to sue a
| university for hosting a freely available HIV database. Perhaps most
| startling of all, that same university -- where much of the seminal research
| on expert systems took place -- entered into a licensing agreement intended
| to limit the use of the HIV database, which had been created by one of its
| own faculty.
`----

http://www.harmfulpatents.org/


Do Patents Kill? A Strange Twist in the Ramkumar vs Samsung Saga

,----[ Quote ]
| A number of papers report that a death in Chennai could be connected with the
| ongoing Ramkumar vs Samsung (and others) patent litigation, a litigation that
| we have been tracking on this blog.
`----

http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-patents-kill-strange-twist-in.html


What use are research patents?

,----[ Quote ]
| In any case, I'm not buying David's assertion that "most universities", or
| most hospitals or research institutes for that matter, rely heavily on
| licensing income. And that being so, I am also somewhat skeptical about the
| number of researchers' families being supported by patents.
|
| What's the Open Science connection? Well, if you're interested in patenting
| the results of your research, there are a lot of restrictions on how you can
| disseminate your results. You can't keep an Open Notebook, or upload
| unprotected work to a preprint server or publicly-searchable repository, or
| even in many cases talk about the IP-related parts of your work at
| conferences. It seems from the data above that most universities would not be
| losing much if they gave up chasing patents entirely; nor would they be
| risking much future income, since so few seem to get significant funds from
| licensing.
`----

http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2009/06/what_use_are_research_patents.php


Time to rethink intellectual property laws?

,----[ Quote ]
| Conversely, there is widespread anecdotal evidence that the act created a
| mind-set among many researchers that their knowledge represents a potential
| goldmine not to be shared with potential competitors (i.e. those working in
| other universities) - at least until it has been protected by a patent
| application.
|
| Similarly, the act has led to a flood of “upstream” patents on basic
| scientific knowledge, leading to what some commentators describe as a
| virtually impenetrable “patent thicket” blocking small-scale inventors from
| marketing their products. For example, restrictive software patents limit
| further development and commercialisation in the field of information
| technology.
`----

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8543&page=


Related:

Patents Over Patients

,----[ Quote ]
| Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit,
| not on their patentability.
`----

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/01moss.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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