🚀 go-pugleaf

Word. Avoiding Gene Patents occupies a disproportionate amount of my
time, and forces anything I invent to be unnecessarily circuitous or
complex. Although I'm naturally hostile to the very concept of idea
ownership, I'd even settle for a ban on patents on naturally occurring
organic sequences, coupled with a ban on patenting multiple sequences in
the same patent, and upon patenting "XX% identity with" statements.

A 20-year monopoly lifecycle may have made sense in the 1800s, but it no
longer takes 20 years to make a return on investment for a decent invention.

A recent post on falkvinge.net contained a pair of clever compromises:
either a yearly binary escalation in registration costs for artificial
monopolies like Copyright and Patents, so that they are initially
affordable to artists/inventors but rapidly become stupidly expensive
for all but the most successful things, or a "declared value" system
where artists/inventors declare a 'public liberation' bounty for their
inventions, and pay a fraction of that to protect their artificial monopoly.

http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/10/declared-value-system/

To apply these to non-natural DNA sequences would offer a compromise for
the corporations who insist that patents are essential for innovation
(or for academics using them as a false proxy for scientific
achievement), while making sure that patents or copyrights are
invalidated by either simple economics or by outsiders paying the
"bounty" to liberate them.

On 13/12/12 15:02, Tonny Johnson wrote:
> Gene patents are discoveries, not inventions and patenting discoveries may hamper future innovations in developing cost-effective patient care products and services. Scientific and technological innovations in molecular cloning, sequencing, PCR, bioinformatics, biochemical methods etc., have created innovative ways to identify genes and assign functions, without these inventions genes would have been a still unknown factor. Thus, gene patents are not true inventions; rather these are discoveries made possible through other technological and scientific inventions. Banning gene patents may offer incredible opportunities for innovations that can attract investments to create sustainable entrepreneurial establishments and scientific jobs, which may be significantly higher that gene patents alone can offer. In contrast, granting gene patents may lead to innovation bottlenecks that favor fewer inventions, restricted entrepreneurial initiatives, limited job growth, and non-competitive mono
poly.  Read the full blog: http://www.sciclips.com/sciclips/blogArticle.do?id=1025&blog=Gene%20patents%20may%20hamper%20innovations%20in%20patient%20care    
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