IP Nonsense
Crazy facts about Intellectual Property:
"ONLY ABOUT 5% of patents end up having any real commercial value."
"U.S. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY is valued at $5.5 trillion, equal to 47% of our GDP and greater than the GDP of any other nation but China."
"NEARLY 20% of the 23,688 known human genes are patented in the United States. Private companies hold 63% of those patents."
Man....
[thanks Raven!]
[tags: intellectualproperty, patents, trademarks, ipsux, opensource, creativecommons]
6 Comments:
i'm sure you've seen the corporation, right? talk about some scary stuff...
How can anyone patent a human gene? Did they invent it?
Funny that IP can mean "intellectual property" or "internet protocol". Kind of antipodal, eh?
I should license that ass kicker. Could be a winner.
baus
"U.S. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY is valued at $5.5 trillion, equal to 47% of our GDP and greater than the GDP of any other nation but China."
Those are crazy, highly adjusted PPP-numbers - purchasing power parity. It's not like China's GDP is number two in the world in terms of raw cash. As the CIA World FACT Book says: "Measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, China in 2005 stood as the second-largest economy in the world after the US, although in per capita terms the country is still lower middle-income."
So, yeah, things are cheap in China, so people can buy a lot of stuff. But those PPP numbers sort of distort reality.
"How can anyone patent a human gene? Did they invent it?"
A patent doesn't necessarily refer to an invention. It refers to anything that a government might wish to grant a monopoly on. The usual argument for doing so is that if you make 100% certain that a business can make a profit in a certain field, the business, unhindered by risk, will make greater investments than it might otherwise, and society (it is assumed) will benefit from the additional investment.
However, most of the economic research I've read suggests that patents rarely bring about an increase in investment. Often the opposite occurs.
In the case of BRCA1 (the breast cancer gene), a lack of originality and inventiveness was cited by the European Patent Office, when they decided to deny the patent to Myriad, which had already acquired the patent in America:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn5016
The magazine Scientific American had a heart breaking story on this issue, but the article doesn't seem to be online. The article pointed out that a dozen companies were working on tests and treatments involving BRCA1, but when Myriad got its patent, all the other companies gave up their BRCA1 research programs and dropped out of the market (they would have had to pay license fees to Myriad if they'd continued).
You can be 99% certain that additional women will die because this patent was granted.
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