12.22.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Patent Cronyism
Summary: False representation of European and international interests by Microsoft and a US ambassador
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.
In the mean time, FFII complains that “Barroso harms the dignity of his office” because Microsoft is hosting the Government Leadership Forum:
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.
Is Microsoft managing Europe now? Techrights must have missed the memo. This screws up European policies and documents like EIFv2, as we’ll cover in the next post. The FFII adds: “Are they afraid of the end for Irish tax dumping?” For those who don’t, Microsoft has arranged it such that Ireland will serve as its tax haven in Europe. That’s another example of laws being written by corporations, for corporations. How absurd and outrageous it must be now that Ireland’s economy is collapsing. A lot of this nonsense actually comes from across the Atlantic and “US Ambassador To The UN” claims that “Protecting Patents & Copyrights More Important Than Development”, suggests TechDirt. Here is the analogous article about the US ambassador. It says:
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.”
Europe is besieged by US partisanship which subverts copyright and patent laws in Europe (Wikileaks/Cablegate has fortunately just derailed the subversion of Spain’s copyright law). We mean not to offend US citizens but rather to help them see the rogue element which they ought to get rid of, also for their own sake. Watch this disturbing news from TechDirt, which opines that gene patents too can be legitimised in the US following this thing:
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.
This is cheered by patent lawyers, but what about all those who are not just taxing the entire system? The patent system was not originally designed to just provide jobs to more lawyers. Something is terribly distorted here. █
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