IT IS bad enough that patent lawyers hijacked the patent system which was intended to serve scientists; many politicians have a professional background in law and they too are not helping as the interests they serve are tied to their mates whom they possibly went to college with. In the near future we'll try to gather the evidence we already have and present examples.
As the President of Microsoft International I had the honour of hosting the Government Leadership Forum (GLF) in London.
An event that unites government leaders from across Europe as well as from the EU institutions. GLF always provides a dynamic, and at times challenging debate, and this year was no exception.
Despite the gains in patenting in capitals, “this group in Geneva seems hell-bent on shortening these patents and creating more exceptions.” She suggested these countries may be motivated by an attempt to boost the market for their domestic generic drug industries.
International intellectual property laws come with built-in exceptions and limitations to the monopolies and exclusivity the rights grant. But King said that “if you create too many exceptions to a rule, you may as well not have the rule.”
Yet, as we worried, last year the appeals court (CAFC), as it has done so often, sided with the patent holders. This summer, when the Supreme Court decided Bilski, one thing it asked CAFC to do was reconsider the Prometheus case. It's now done so, and nothing much has changed. Once again, CAFC has said that basic diagnostic tests may be patentable. Many also think (probably correctly) that this is a good indication that CAFC will also reverse a lower court ruling in the Myriad Genetics case, concerning whether or not genes are patentable. If diagnostic tests are patentable, why not genes? Of course, all this really means is that sooner or later the Supreme Court is going to have to weigh in again, and hopefully it won't punt the issue like it did in Bilski.