Get Ready For The “Witch Hunt”
Rebecca Morelle has a nice article for the BBC, Creating life in the laboratory, that rounds up all of the major research efforts currently taking place around the world.
While I’m sure that this makes a number of people decidedly unhappy, there really is a purpose that doesn’t involve lab assistants named Igor or lightning bolts. Much of the research is aimed at creating microorganisms to help clean up the mess we have made of the planet – bio-Roombas on a very small scale to deal with oil spills, greenhouse gases, and other problems.
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Much of the problem is with the commercialization of this kind of technology, and patents on living organisms are a bad idea.
If I were these guys I wouldn’t depend on patent protection anymore. The people at the Patent Office are starting to be a lot more critical of patent applications. Things that have received patents in the past may no longer be accepted.
The recent Amazon.com case is a lead indicator that these things are now subject to more scrutiny than before and you may see more of these claims rejected as derivative rather than original.
Now that there is a database of these “creations” the Patent Office can look at the application and say that the organism was obvious derived from earlier work rather than an original creation. Every time there’s a new field opened up it takes the Office a while to have enough information to judge, but that time is coming.
They have already shut off the extensions the drug companies were getting for minor alterations in patented drugs, so bio-tech is going to hit the same wall.
I think you underestimate the harm of patents on living things, like Monsanto’s Bt crops with terminator genes. While it’s entirely possible for biotech to be used for good (and my own medicine is based on such technology), it is also very possible to be misused by those corporations seeking a profit.
Patents, unlike copyright, are for very limited durations. By finally addressing the reality of derivative improvements, the first patents started the clock on the removal of possible future patents. The problem goes away when the first patents expire, which is the intent of a patent – the creator gets exclusive use for a fixed term, but then everyone gets to jump in and use the process.
The problem has been the failure of the Patent Office to recognize the follow-on products as derivatives.
Copyrights are too supposed to be for limited durations.
And so they once were, but they have been pushed out to near infinity by the lobbying lead by the “Mouse”. Walt Disney Inc keeps pounding away at extensions so that their catalog will never fall into the public domain.