Shame on you Senator Patrick Leahey
Aug 1st, 2007 by jim
1. What scares big companies is disruptive innovaton carried out by individuals and small firms. There are no scale effects in innovation. Bach, Mozart were individuals. Larry Ellison of Oracle famously says that software technology innovation can no longer be accomplished in large companies. This is why Oracle acquires companies right and left. Microsoft spends billions of dollars a year, and only comes up with incremental improvements.
The same is broadly true in other fields. Most biotech innovation happens in universities or small labs. Even Apple, the famous innovator, is highly dependent on small outside design firms, and a few individuals carefully nurtured in the firm, for both look-and-feel and technology innovation.
The US as a whole needs innovation.
The US needs to nurture innovative individuals.
2. The following analysis shows that strong patents are pro-innovation. I have excerpted a small bit, but please click to the full article. From Science magazine.
The author points out that patents of building blocks promoted innovation across history and across industries.
3. This puts to lie the arguments supporting a bill that weakens patent law, currently being pushed by Patrick Leahey of Vermont.
Efforts to weaken patent law come almost entirely from two groups. First, the lobbyists for very large, traditional firms. In information technology, it is the established “gorillas” like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Cisco. Second, from policy wonks who are funded by the big companies.
These big gorilla techs named above are today’s version of the big auto companies, big plastics companies and big pharma companie, each of which tried to quash patents as they tightened control over their industries.
Big companies dominate their industries by economies of scale, by monopolies and oligopolies on distribution, and on stopping new entrants by “killing the snake while it is small” (or buying the snake when it is mid-sized).
In autos, they succeeded. In plastics and pharma they did not. In materials and in biotech there are vibrant communities of independent think tanks and innovation laboratories that make their living licensing patented inventions to larger firms or directly to the public.
The information technology industry looks more like the early auto company days than it does the early biotech days. This is because small companies in information technology have not figured out the value of their intellectual property, and how to protect it.
Big companies in information technology depend on squashing small companies, buying intellectual property on the cheap from small companies, and buying pioneering companies on the cheap. They can easily do this when the small companies either don’t protect their intellectual property (a problem in many small software companies) or open source their technology in unwise ways. Big companies are now trying to weaken the patent system before the small companies wake up to its value.
Who is taking the money from these big companies to do their bidding? Senator Patrick Leahey of Vermont–for whom John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, held a big fundraiser in Vermont. Why did Chambers, who lives in Silicon Valley, come to Vermont to do a fundraiser. You connect the dots.
Leahey is now aggressively pushing changes to the patent system that make it harder for small companies to succeed, and easier for big companies to triumph.
Leahey has, to put it bluntly, sold out.
He probably figured no one would notice. This is typically how Senators agree to sell out. They pick an issue that is important to a group of wealthy companies, and try to slip changes in unnoticed.
Shame on your Senator Leahey.
BIOTECHNOLOGY: The Patenting of DNA — Doll 280 (5364): 689 — Science
..in the USPTO’s view, new areas of technology do not create the need for a whole new specialized patent law. In many ways, the arguments currently being used for DNA sequence technology resemble those voiced 30 to 40 years ago when polymer chemistry was an emerging technology. At that time, people argued that if broad generic claims were granted on the building blocks of basic polymers, it would devastate the industry. In fact, no such disaster occurred. For example, the issuing in 1965 of a basic patent broadly claiming a vulcanizable copolymer of aliphatic mono-olefins and unsaturated bridged-ring hydrocarbons (3) did not preclude the later issuing of patents to different inventors for several copolymers of this type (4). These patents represent early examples of ethylene-propylene-diene monomer (EPDM) rubbers, which are highly weather- and ozone-resistant, stable to thermal aging, and have good electrical insulating properties. These EPDM rubbers have been commercially important as components in tires, weather stripping, radiator hoses, wire insulation, impact modifiers, and roofing.
EPDM copolymers were assembled from three basic building blocks that could be combined in many different ways and, as such, generic and specific claims to these copolymers are analogous to claims that may be issued to DNA inventions. Just as the issuing of broad product claims at the early stages of this technology did not deter development of other new vulcanizable copolymers, the issuing of relatively broad claims in genomic technology should not deter inventions in genomics. Two relevant examples of this in the field of biotechnology are the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) protease, which were patented and then widely licensed to permit the biotech industry to continue to grow and benefit from these inventions.
The same patentability analysis is conducted for every patent application, regardless of whether the application is for a computer chip, a mechanical apparatus, a pharmaceutical, or a piece of DNA. In every field of technology–whether emerging, complex, or competitive–all the conditions for patentability (such as statutory subject matter utility, enablement, written description, novelty, and non-obviousness) must be met before a claim is allowed (5).