“The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that raises a fundamental question: whether a physician can infringe a patent merely by using scientific research to inform her treatment decisions. Unfortunately, this issue was barely mentioned in Wednesday’s arguments. A number of influential organizations had filed briefs warning of the dire consequences of allowing medical patents, but their arguments were largely ignored in the courtroom. Instead, everyone seemed to agree that medical patents were legal in general, and focused on the narrow question of whether the specific patent in the case was overly broad.” One day, American policy makers are going to wake up and realise they’ve made their country irrelevant. The amount of stupidity American policy makers exhibit never ceases to amaze me.
Not stupidity Thom, but pure and simple greed.
We’re 100% the nation for sale to the highest bidder.
See Citizens United, what a PAC is and what a 501(c)(4) is. We have to find a way to fix those things else we can’t fix anything else as our elections are starting to require insane amounts of money for any seat.
“The Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities”
– Winston Churchill
Take a look at 35 U.S.C. 287(C). Basically, it says that certain persons and organizations can infringe a patent due to their medical activities. But despite such infringement there are no damages or injunctive relief available against such persons and organizations. I’m not saying this law applies to the patent at issue here. I haven’t bothered to look at it. But, the reality is that many medical related patents aren’t worth the paper they are printed on because the only people that are likely to infringe aren’t liable for damages.
I’ve always thought the open source community should be lobbying for a similar limitation on damages for open source software. Much more likely to be enacted than trying to deny patentability to software in general. Sure, get a patent on your software, but you aren’t going to collect damages from any open source infringers. Would even provide incentives for releasing software as open source in order to reduce the risk of patent infringement.
The USA isn’t alone. All sorts of other countries are doing this and it never gets to their courts for a fair hearing.
http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/7022095.html
http://www.patentgenius.com/assignee/OccupationalMedicalInnovations…
http://www.patentgenius.com/class/206/571.html
http://www.patentgenius.com/class/623.html
For a grand total of nearing a million patents worldwide.
http://www.patentgenius.com/category/HealthMedicine.html
And for some of you. http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/4194502.html
Edited 2011-12-08 17:03 UTC
These are patents for medical devices. They have very frequently been patented.
From what arguments Shapiro isn’t using I’m wondering if a decision to invalidate the patent (on the basis argued by AARP, etc) might invalidate some patents Mayo holds.
There’s nothing unique here. It’s pretty consistent with every other area of patent law and the goals of government with respect to intellectual property.
Did it take research to find out out the dosage levels? Absolutely.
Does it represent a new way of applying the drug? Absolutely.
Hence, someone out there believes there should be money attached to that. It’s not unique to the medial industry. People who work in chemical engineering have seen this as well.