The less cynical take would be: The argument for the bill is that corporations will discover more genes faster if they are able to monopolize human genes they d

The less cynical take would be: The argument for the bill is that corporations will discover more genes faster if they are able to monopolize human genes they discovered, and patent expiration will place them in the public domain decades later, possibly faster than if we waited for someone to do the research without the expectation of monopoly. The question is, will it be really faster in the average case? The dumpster fire in software patents is that they often cover what anyone would, and often did, discover independently relatively quickly when first facing the problem. As Joel Spolsky has put it: >The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. >The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours. I have no idea what would be the case in genetic biotech.