aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
The First Amendment’s been bought and paid for!
Long ago, actually, but we still don’t seem to realize it.
Michael Crighton has an excellent op-ed in the Sunday Times on the isane overreach of US patent law, the limits of which are to be tested today before the Supreme Court. In dispute is the increasingly common practice of pharmaceutical companies, research labs and individual scientists of patenting specific medical procedures or tests. Today’s case deals specifically with a basic diagnostic procedure patented by three doctors in 1990 that helps spot deficiency in a certain kind of Vitamin B by testing a patient’s folic acid levels.
Under current laws, a small royalty must be paid not only to perform the test, but to even mention it. That’s right, writing it down or even saying it out loud requires payment. Which means that I am in violation simply for describing it above. As is the AP reporter whose story filled me in on the details of the case. And also Michael Crighton for describing the test in his column (an absurdity acknowledged in his title: “This Essay Breaks the Law"). Need I (or may I) say more? [...]
It seems everything - even “laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas” (AP) - is information that someone can own. It goes far beyond the digital frontiers we usually talk about here. Yet the expansion of the laws of ownership - what McKenzie Wark calls “the relentless abstraction of the world” - essentially digitizes everything, and everyone.
