I get a lot of flack for this in political circles but I think that IP law is a field which has more importance for the future regarding individual rights than, say, abortion. We are talking about IP-based monopolies here over crops, medical tests, and the like, and the scope of these patents is just unprecedented. I don't know what to call those who want such power other than evil.
The Supreme Court has been pretty good recently on these issues, for example overturning patents on recommended results in medical tests (and therefore allowing competing ways of measuring the same thing), greatly restricting uses of secondary patents in medicines and the like. Now they are considering two cases:
1) When you patent a self-replicating technology, is the patent exhausted when the product self-replicates, particularly when the purpose of the patented object is self-replication (patented soybean seeds have the purpose of producing more soybean seeds and that's what they are sold for the purpose of doing). I suppose this would have some implications regarding home rose gardens and the ability to legally share patented clones but aside from emerging transgenic crops the implications are not very heavy.
2) Can a part of the human genome in the abstract be patented? Who owns your genes? I think this must necessarily follow that these can't be patented from Prometheus v. Mayo (decided last year, no IANAL) because that case held that you couldn't patent what the result of a drug test meant. But if this can't be patented, then surely patents on crops are exhausted after first sale.
I get a lot of flack for this in political circles but I think that IP law is a field which has more importance for the future regarding individual rights than, say, abortion. We are talking about IP-based monopolies here over crops, medical tests, and the like, and the scope of these patents is just unprecedented. I don't know what to call those who want such power other than evil.
The Supreme Court has been pretty good recently on these issues, for example overturning patents on recommended results in medical tests (and therefore allowing competing ways of measuring the same thing), greatly restricting uses of secondary patents in medicines and the like. Now they are considering two cases:
1) When you patent a self-replicating technology, is the patent exhausted when the product self-replicates, particularly when the purpose of the patented object is self-replication (patented soybean seeds have the purpose of producing more soybean seeds and that's what they are sold for the purpose of doing). I suppose this would have some implications regarding home rose gardens and the ability to legally share patented clones but aside from emerging transgenic crops the implications are not very heavy.
2) Can a part of the human genome in the abstract be patented? Who owns your genes? I think this must necessarily follow that these can't be patented from Prometheus v. Mayo (decided last year, no IANAL) because that case held that you couldn't patent what the result of a drug test meant. But if this can't be patented, then surely patents on crops are exhausted after first sale.