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In article <f4bq9q$37q$1@news.datemas.de>,
Jan Panteltje <pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/90868
***{Here is an article in English dealing with the same basic subject
matter: http://www.angelfire.com/moon/nsi/patented.htm.
The article starts out discussing the experience of a fellow named John
Moore, whose life was apparently saved via an experimental procedure
performed by a medical researcher named Dr. Golde, who in the process of
saving Moore's life patented several discoveries he made inside the
previously uncharted territory of John Moore's body. Well, it appears
that Moore was a bit of an ingrate. Once his life had been saved, he
decided that he deserved to share in the profits from Dr. Golde's
discoveries. Here is an excerpt describing the implications of the court
decision that resulted:
"John Moore didn't own his own body. Neither do you. Not your body, not
your blood, not even your genes. Not unless you've got a patent. And
it's too late to get a patent on some parts of your body. They've
already been sold. Like, for example, the gene called BRCA1. There's a
chance you have that gene. There's an even better chance your wife has
it, or your sister or your mom, because that's the gene for breast
cancer. If you could test yourself for BRCA1 right now, or if you could
test your wife or your sister or your mom, you probably would, right?
Just to be on the safe side. But you can't test yourself because you
don't know how, and your doctor can't test you because he's not allowed
-- at least, not without permission from the person who owns the gene.
And that person isn't you. It might be in your body, but it doesn't
belong to you. It belongs to a company called Myriad Genetics in Salt
Lake City. So if you want to know whether you have the gene for breast
cancer, you're going to have to call somebody for permission. Then
you're going to have to pay for the cost of the doctor's visit, plus a
$2,500 fee to Myriad Genetics just to access its gene, the gene inside
your body. Those are the rules of the patent game. That's what a patent
means: exclusive access. And the last time somebody broke those rules,
the last time somebody ran a test for BRCA1 without permission, Myriad
Genetics went after them. And Myriad Genetics made them stop. And that
was a university. And that's just BRCA1. There are about a thousand
other human genes that have been patented. Some of them are in your
body, and many of them are important, like the one for Alzheimer's
disease and the one for epilepsy and the one for brain cancer. If you
happen to have one of those genes, it might interest you to know that
researchers are paying to access them, too, sometimes millions of
dollars just to continue the work of looking for a cure."
"It's not just genes, either. There's a patent on the blood inside every
human umbilical cord. So if, by chance, your newborn baby needs that
blood, don't expect to get it for free. There's also a Swiss company
called Novartis that has a patent on the stem cells in your American
bone marrow. Don't expect to access those cells if you ever need a
transplant, either, unless you're prepared to pay. Some companies have
patents on entire species of animals, like the species of mice and pigs
that belong to DuPont. You can patent people, too, and not just John
Moore. These days, you can get a patent on just about anybody; a patent
issued in 1995 to the U. S. Department of Health covered the cell line
of an unsuspecting member of the Hagahai tribe in Papua, New Guinea,
whose resistance to certain diseases made him valuable to researchers."
My view: the person who creates, invents, or discovers something that is
capable of being mass produced, is entitled to royalties from those who
mass produce it for commercial purposes, or who sell equipment that can
be used to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes. No one person or
company, however, is entitled to monopolize the production of such
items. That means if you write a book, you are entitled to royalties
from those who reproduce it for commercial purposes, and from the
sellers of copying equipment (computers, xerox machines, etc.) that can
be used to make copies for non-commercial users.
Unfortunately, we are afflicted with legislatures, and, as a result,
with politicized courts. What this means is that political pressure
groups which, being neither plaintiff nor defendant, have no proper
involvement in a case, can nevertheless influence the outcome. If a
court hands down a decision that a legislature finds to be displeasing,
the legislature can pass a law that overrides the decision in future
cases. Since judges know that a precedent set in court, if based solely
on the arguments and evidence relevant to the specific case, can be
tossed out based on politics, they try to avoid handing down decisions
that will create a political uproar--which means: they are subject to
political influence. And since vast profits can be made if monopoly
privileges can be obtained from government, would-be monopolists have
spent, and continue to spend, vast amounts of money lobbying
legislatures worldwide to obtain such privileges. One result of such
efforts has been to ensure that a patent does not merely entitle its
holder to royalties, but confers a monopoly.
A monopoly is the exclusive right to produce a thing. That means no one
can compete with the monopolist and, thus, that he can charge any price
he likes, so long as he does not provoke an uproar that will prompt an
legislature to intervene. That means he can charge much higher prices
than would be possible if every Tom, *****, and Harry could enter his
market and provide the same service. If that means you can't use the
stem cells in your own body to save your daughter's life unless you
impoverish yourself to pay some big pharmaceutical company a huge fee,
too bad. In the modern world, a patent does not confer the right to
receive royalties. It confers, instead, a monopoly.
My view: legislatures and government courts should not exist. Disputes
over property (your body is your property, so, for example, a murder
trial is a dispute over property) should be settled in private
arbitration. That means a description of the dispute should be posted in
a suitable public venue (e.g., on the internet) and those persons
willing to adjudicate it should be asked to submit their names. A list
of those who submitted their names should be made up, and, after the
plaintiff and defendant have had time to investigate the track records
of the proposed arbiters, they should take turns striking one third of
the names off the list, rounded to the nearest whole number, until only
one name remained. That person would then arbitrate the dispute, write
up a detailed description of the facts presented, his reasoning about
those facts, and, finally, state his decision. That decision would be
binding on the parties, unless overturned in an appeal conducted in the
same way. Under such a system, there would be no need for "law," because
the precedents set in private arbitration would have the same effect as
law: they would provide a framework of rules that members of the society
would learn, and use to guide their conduct.
The difference between rules of conduct derived from precedents set in
private arbitration, and rules derived from laws passed by legislatures,
however, would be enormous: in the former case, the rules would arise
naturally, from a reasoned determination of what seemed fair, based on
consideration of concrete disputes between real people; in the latter,
the rules would arise from political pressure--which means: the evidence
of a particular case and a desire to be fair to two specific disputants
would have little or no influence on the outcome. Instead, the largest,
or best organized, or richest pressure group, or the one that howled the
loudest, or the one that bribed the right people, or a compromise that
gave a tidbit to each of the contending parties, or some similar
abomination that ignored the facts and evidence of any particular case,
would prevail.
Bottom line: the world is going to hell in a hand basket because
governments have the power to make law, and the absurdities discussed in
the referenced article about biogenetic patents are only one symptom
among many pointing to that underlying disease.
--Mitchell Jones}***
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If I seem to be ignoring you, consider the possibility
that you are in my killfile. --MJ
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