[ExI] Gene Patents: Good or Bad?

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Wed May 26 16:32:34 UTC 2010


--- On Wed, 5/26/10, samantha <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> In general 
> patents on things that a competent practitioner would
> invent with come 
> up with themselves as a reasonable possible solution are a
> bad thing to 
> put patent roadblocks on.

Well said.  The problem isn't patents in general.  It's
that the offices that grant patents are not equipped to
understand what most practitioners in any new-tech field
could easily come up with, as opposed to what takes
serious innovation and resources to develop, and that a
lot of folk have picked up on this and flooded the patent
office with applications for simple things (which only
compounds the patent offices' lack of resources).

This, in turn, can be traced to the continued pressure on
politicians to add more services and perform them with
less tax dollars - regardless of whether the services
actually continue to function well (or ever functioned
well, for new services).  There is a reason so many
aspiring politicians start by promising to clean up waste
and fraud, but once in office, find there isn't as much
to clean up as many people think.  (There is some, but
the combined efforts of previous generations of
politicians have reduced it substantially from where it
otherwise would be.)



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