It’s not just about the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. The proposed alternative to pharmaceutical patents starts from the fact that the big pharmaceutical companies officially admit they only spend 15% of their revenues on research, to suggest that the governments could take 20% of what they currently spend on drugs (which is a lot of money!) and allocate it to pharmaceutical research, with the results free to anyone. However, the Pirate Party is the only political party to have asserted that all kind of patents have to be abolished, not only the pharmaceutical patents and the software patents!

In the same way, the Pirate Party opposes patents -- especially in software, but also in other areas.

"All patents, at their base, are innovation inhibitors," he maintains. "Patents delayed the industrial revolution by thirty years. They delayed the advent of the North American avionics industry by another thirty years, until the first world war broke out, and the US government confiscated the patents. It delayed radio for five years." Today, he suggests, advances in electric cars and eco-friendly infrastructure are similarly blocked by patents.

Call him Dr. No. Locked in a bitter dispute over how he can use the fruits of his research, Bob Shafer is asking the same question the courts are now grappling with: Just what can be patented, anyway?

Our genes might be practically open to discovery, there's very little physically I can do to prevent you from acquiring my genes and unraveling my genetic code. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be disturbing or unethical if you did this. The knowledge you could get about me, and use against me, is just too potentially disruptive to decide that we are not somehow each custodians, and maybe even more properly guardians, of our individual genetic data.

At the same time, the genome we share cannot be cordoned off. To the degree that our genetic information is mostly the same, we should all have access to it. No one should be able to claim that if we want to peek around, learn some more, and do some studies on this common genetic code, we somehow have to pay for this. Our "common genetic heritage" is, I argue, an actual commons like the sky, sunlight, or international waters. We should treat it as such.

Guess which wins?

Last night the House voted overwhelmingly to establish new U.S. policy that will oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP rights of American "green technology."

Staggering. Sickening. Suicidal. (Via Against Monopoly.)

Intellectual “property” (IP) is a sleeper issue. It seems uncontroversial: Someone invents or writes something and therefore owns it. What could be plainer? But IP contains the power to destroy liberty.

IP isn’t merely about rock bands preventing kids from sharing MP3s over the Internet. (See “Weird Al” Yankovic’s musical commentary, “Don’t Download This Song,” here.) It’s about crusty incumbent firms trying to preserve market share by stifling competition, domestically and in the developing world.

We've discussed the difference between "invention" (doing something new) and "innovation" (finding a new successful market) before, and it's resulted in some long and occasionally contentious discussions. Fred Wilson put up a post recently where he looked at a series of product "success" stories, and tried to figure out what was the key to success. In each one, he noted that the product enabled people to do stuff in a different way -- but one of the key findings, was that they all had something else in common: being drop dead simple, leading to much greater adoption

Since the launch of the Wii, Nintendo has been the subject of no fewer than 15 patent-related lawsuits. While many of those suits are still winding their way through the courts, Nintendo on Thursday issued a statement touting victory over Guardian Media Technologies in one of the more recent patent suits.