4 ms·
Small nitpick, but patents protect novelty, not uniqueness. If someone creates a human gene that is not available in nature, then it is novel.
by Retra 7y ago
Small nitpick, but patents protect novelty, not uniqueness. If someone creates a human gene that is not available in nature, then it is novel.
- inetknght 7y agoCare to explain how it's a human gene if it's not available in nature?
- hanniabu 7y agoThey created it... here "in nature" infers to be naturally occurring
- lostmyoldone 7y agoIt still wouldn't be a human gene, possibly a human compatible gene, but not a human gene.
- hanniabu 7y agoIt's no different than mutations so what you're basically saying it's that people with genetic mutations aren't human. Also, pretty much any difference can be seen as a "mutation" since everyone has different genes.
- Retra 7y agoI don't see the relevance of that question.
- mac01021 7y agoStill, though, what is a gene? Is it just a nucleotide sequence, as described using the letters A, C, G, & T? For a body of text like that, isn't copyright the more appropriate IP construct? A patent might be valid if it referred to a particular process for synthesizing that gene in the form of a DNA molecule.
- Retra 7y agoWhile I agree with you, you can also look at a gene as a particular process for synthesizing its effects. It's not much different from source code in that perspective; doesn't matter how you created it, it matters what it creates. Patent law is a bit nonsensical, IMO. It doesn't handle the real world well.
- jerf 7y agoI've believed for about 20 years now that the law still has never fully grappled with the concept of something that is both an expression of some sort and yet also a machine. Computer code is the real-world example of that, but genetics are fairly similar. I think it's why decisions about things like the copyrightability of APIs have been so complicated; the law has still never deeply grappled with the question of how to harmonize the several deeply different legal regimes that "executable expressions" can be affected by. What is the set-intersection of patents and copyrights? That's a really thorny question if you sit down and try to take it seriously.
- mac01021 7y agoWhat does the law say about recipes of the sort that you find in cookbooks?
- jerf 7y agoMostly that they aren't copyrightable at all, so it's not a helpful analogy since the law equally clearly holds that software is. I've heard anecdotally that that's why there's so many cooking blogs that bloviate endlessly about how the recipe will look when it's done and what it made them feel when they ate it first and maybe just a bit of history about the region where it's from before finally almost-begrudgingly consenting to share the recipe, because that's all copyrightable content that can't be legally stolen, whereas if they just posted a bare recipe, anybody could walk off with it.