THE world's 'death patents', which are promoted by the Gates Foundation, are an ethical problem and we have many older posts about the subject. The patent dilemma is most pronounced when people are killed by patents or their lives held as hostage by patents. SJVN, whose career involves a great deal of UNIX and Linux (then journalism), gets around to addressing this subject. He writes about "killer patents" as he calls them.
In the computer technology business, we tend to see patents as being bad for developers and business. What we don't realize that the problems we have with Microsoft's bogus patent claims against Linux and Oracle's patent-based attack against Google are nothing compared to the evils that IP patents bring to the pharmacy business.
Take, for example, the assault that the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is now mounting on Abbot Labs. PUBPAT is formally asking the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine eight Abbot patents relating to the critical HIV/AIDS drug Ritonavir, aka Norvir.
Ritonavir, a protease inhibitor, was one of the early HIV/AID antiviral drugs. Today, as HIV has grown tougher, it is now more widely used to enhance the efficacy of other protease inhibitors in AIDs drug cocktails. In this role, it's still a critical HIV/AIDS drug.
But as Eben Moglen pointed out recently at LinuxCon, the patent crisis in general isn't going away. So it's best that we figure out the very best ways to deal with it. I'm told his talk will be available as video soon, and when it's up, it will be here on the Linux Foundation website.
Linux and FOSS compete on who has the best code, not patent infringement lawsuits, speaking of vision. It's a superior development model. Nobody competes with courtrooms. I'm not saying no one sues. The GPL lawsuits are about copyright infringement, but they are what they say they are, not wolves in granny's cap to fool Red Riding Hood. It's why the code keeps getting better and better.
Reader Murdoch points us to one of Wired's regular "this day in tech" history pieces about how Louis Daguerre revealed all of the "secrets" to making daguerrotypes, which was the basis for photography, in 1839. Rather than a "patent" to lock up the offering, the French government gave Daguerre and his partner, Isidore Niepce, pensions in exchange for freeing the knowledge -- with each receiving the equivalent today of $30,000 per year -- a decent, but hardly huge sum. And with all that information public, suddenly everyone started innovating on the idea and trying to improve it, leading to modern photography.
THE MAKER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK, HP has is going after its cheap and cheerful rivals, claiming that they have nicked its technology.
HP has asked the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to have a look at some of the inkjet ink supplies and components that are being shipped to the Land of the Free.