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Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#61

Post by mattlutze »

ekianjo wrote: post #16
mirimir wrote: post #10

Now, if we can just agree that natural products and traditional cures can't be patented. India has been fighting hard for that.

If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.

No patents anywhere means companies with more money and a thumb on the pulse will unabashedly ape smaller do-ers work.

We should encourage independent inventors and small / mid-size businesses to risk capital on R&D, and reward them with a bit of protection so they can do some marketing while bringing a new thing to market, without having to worry about a big company duplicating their work and selling over them.

The internet doesn't fix the economies of scale afforded by a big cash pile, for either marketing or distribution.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #37
personjerry wrote: post #34

Although we might be clear on what we perceive to be the right ruling, it is not always so simple. For example, what if we claimed in software that any software program, given that it is merely a series of bits, is therefore merely a number, and thus a "product of mathematics" not produced by man?

Copyright is far and away the best IP category for software - I strongly argue it is a form of literacy anyway. And I am not convinced there is any mathematics outside the mind of humans - it's an odd one, but is not maths a model of the world rather than the world itself?

> is not maths a model of the world rather than the world itself?

This isn't right. It sounds like a very "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" view of things.

Any model of anything is math. The world is bound by the math, not the other way around.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#63

Post by teekert »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #58
teekert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely ignoring the fact that large Pharma companies would be unable to have any return on investment, would not be able to pay their employees and thus many people would be unemployed and there would thus be no incentive to even develop new drugs.

I think drug development is one of the strongest cases for a patent system. However: > many people would be unemployed This isn't an argument at all. It's better for people to be unemployed than to be employed in an enterprise that makes everyone else worse off. > and there would thus be no incentive to even develop new drugs Of course there would. We had drug development before we had patents.

> This isn't an argument at all. It's better for people to be unemployed than to be employed in an enterprise that makes everyone else worse off.

Are you hinting at a specific company? I don't think the people that got cured from metastatic cancer would agree that they would be better of without Merck and their PD-L1 antibodies.

To be clear I'm responding to ekianjo's > If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. I'm also not in favor of patenting natural products, gene sequences and traditional cures.

I am in favor of establishing a system where a companies would have a solid return on investment while still having the drug available to everybody without damaging the incentive to invest billions to come up with only a handful of drugs. The problem is, the drug market is not a free market, an individual has no reasonable way of saying "I don't agree to your price and I will thus not use your product." ... as consumers have with normal products.

>Of course there would. We had drug development before we had patents. Perhaps I should say: There would be no efficient, lean very driven companies looking for drugs. Off course there may have been people who found drugs out of hobby of while being paid for by the state.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#64

Post by pjc50 »

mattlutze wrote: post #61
ekianjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.

No patents anywhere means companies with more money and a thumb on the pulse will unabashedly ape smaller do-ers work. We should encourage independent inventors and small / mid-size businesses to risk capital on R&D, and reward them with a bit of protection so they can do some marketing while bringing a new thing to market, without having to worry about a big company duplicating their work and selling over them. The…

Big cash piles are easy to turn into a big patent pile which can be used to fence out independent inventors and small / mid-size businesses. What proportion of patents are filed by SMEs anyway?

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#65

Post by ekianjo »

teekert wrote: post #56
ekianjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.

You are completely ignoring the fact that large Pharma companies would be unable to have any return on investment, would not be able to pay their employees and thus many people would be unemployed and there would thus be no incentive to even develop new drugs.

Not true at all. Look at Bio drugs for example. Even when they are to be generiqued, there is almost no company jumping in to make them because it's damn hard to make in the first place and there is very little incentive to do so, so the major players stay in place. A good example: all injectable diabetes drugs, but there are others out there as well.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#67

Post by thatusertwo »

personjerry wrote: post #34

Although we might be clear on what we perceive to be the right ruling, it is not always so simple. For example, what if we claimed in software that any software program, given that it is merely a series of bits, is therefore merely a number, and thus a "product of mathematics" not produced by man?

Though the logics are similar, the human effort is more in the developing of the tools to sequence DNA, the DNA itself has always existed. With software, the problem might always have existed but a solution needs to be developed independently.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#68

Post by mattlutze »

pjc50 wrote: post #64
mattlutze wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No patents anywhere means companies with more money and a thumb on the pulse will unabashedly ape smaller do-ers work. We should encourage independent inventors and small / mid-size businesses to risk capital on R&D, and reward them with a bit of protection so they can do some marketing while bringing a new thing to market, without having to worry about a big company duplicating their work and selling over them. The…

Big cash piles are easy to turn into a big patent pile which can be used to fence out independent inventors and small / mid-size businesses. What proportion of patents are filed by SMEs anyway?

In one study by the US Small Business Administration, they looked at 2007-2009 (to understand economic activity during the height of the Great Recession) and noted 42% of companies that file 15 or more patents over the two-year period had 500 employees or less (which is, to them, a small to medium business).

https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/rs411tot.pdf

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#69

Post by kybernetyk »

flipp3r wrote: post #48
kybernetyk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, companies will stop doing research now. That's what I'm worried about, too. For example C60 [1] is a curious molecule that can't be patented anymore. In a rat study it showed to prolong the rats' lives by over 90% [2] by protecting the rats from cancer. Sadly there won't be any human study anytime soon (if at all) because it's just not financially viable without the possibility of patenting the stuff and extract…

You should read the comment section of the second link. The badly done research was done by someone whose business is selling snake oil with c60 in it.

Hmm, interesting.

Has anyone here access to the referenced paper [1] and can confirm that "Anthony Loera" worked on it?

[1] http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S014296121200323...

Ref.: Baati T, et al., The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60]fullerene, Biomaterials (2012), doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2012.03.036

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#70

Post by doki_pen »

ekianjo wrote: post #16
mirimir wrote: post #10

Now, if we can just agree that natural products and traditional cures can't be patented. India has been fighting hard for that.

If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.

Not true. Patents increase the incentive for people to do hard research and development. Whether or not that increased incentive is necessary is debatable.
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