Posts by ScottY
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Pete, I'm no fan of Rankin, but I found your last post odious and offensive. Suicide's no joke.
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Time to call "Time Gentleman, Please" on certain currents in this conversation?
Hey if that"other" thread can get to almost 100 pages, so can we!
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I knew this Government would be good for satire. I had no idea it would be this good. They're writing it for us, literally.
I always wondered how they made rat poison
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I guess the way I look at it is that copyright applies to information and patents applies to processes - you copyright a genome, you patent something you can do with a newly invented gene is a process
To put it extremely crudely, patents protect ideas that can be reduced to practice (i.e. inventions), while copyright laws protect the expressions of ideas. There is no copyright in mere information. But if that information is expressed in a particular form (e.g a database or a compilation) then that form might attract copyrght protection.
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That's one of the main problem with the current patent system - it's the death of a 1000 cuts - everywhere you turn someone's patented the bleeding obvious and you can spend all your time designing around them - the patent system is supposed to be there so that people are encouraged to disclose bright ideas so that others can build on them and create even better stuff - these days it's become something that's used to do almost exactly the opposite.
Paul, I have plenty of clients making a living from their patent portfolios. I'll acknowledge that some areas of science and technology are crowded by patents, but in many other fields of science and technology there are plenty of opportunities to protect something new. I am probably biased, as I work in the IP field, but without a patent system we'd have very little innovation.
Equally copyright should apply to genomes - but at some minimal size - you can't copyright a single character, or even a word, equally I don't think you should be able to copyright a sinhle base pair, or for that matter anything shorter than some minimal length - lets say 100 base pairs just as a strawman. Unless the entire genome is de-novo you shouldn't be able to copyright the bits you didn't invent.
I'm not sure how relevant copyright is to what you're describing. Copyright laws apply to creative works. Genomes are not creative worls. They exist already. Copyright laws allow people to claim copyright in compliations, so it is conceivable that a database or compliation of genome information might in some circumstances attract copyright protection as a copyright work. But the bits of information themselves are not protectable by copyright.
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Bart is right. Government funding will always be limited, and the current public funding model puts a heavy emphasis on commercialisation. I don't see that changing ever.
If we don't allow commercial entities to protect what they develop, or what they have paid others to develop, there won't be a lot of R&D other than a little bit of "public good" stuff which some organisations currently do.
And nobody in the life sciences game is going to invest in a product if they can't stop someone else from pinching the idea. That's why we have patents. Making innovation available to everyone would mean not much innovation. If you asked a VC to invest in a biotech or life sciences company that had no patents for its products they would probably laugh at you.
Now if your aim is to prevent all GE research, insisting it remain under Government control wouild certainly be a good step towards that.
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wtf? I guess they must be just one more poor misunderstood, much-maligned, multinational...:
WTF indeed. I'm bored of the whole " multinational = evil scum" angle. Is belief in an evil multinational cabal a requirement for membership of the Greens? Just wondering.
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The irony is that Labour by making this attack has ensured that Melissa Lee's name recognition will go sky high.
And that media strategy worked well for Winston Peters in last year's election, didn't it?
I'm glad you're keeping an eye on Whaleoil, because I can't bring myself to visit his site. I have a weak stomach.
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Field? He's guilty as. Hasn't he been hung yet?
Why do we have a court system again? Let's just let Rich decide who to string up. Think of the savings.
On the Lee thing, I'm prepared to let the investigations taking place proceed before passing judgment on whether she there has been any impropriety.
We can say with perfect confidence, however, that Lee is a moving PR wreck. Her attempt at an apology just makes matters worse. Her supporters must be throwing their hands up in despair.