Against Monopoly
defending the right to innovate
Blocking Technology
Monopoly corrupts. Absolute monopoly corrupts absolutely.
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French firm has patents on using computers to choose medical treatment
Is anybody here aware of the website, HarmfulPatents.org link here? It is a new ally in the fight against patent-based monopoly. Mike Masnick gets a hat tip for this one, in his site, link here. HarmfulPatents is run by a doctor-professor at Stanford, Dr. Robert Shafer. He had developed a database on HIV that is used to identify possible treatments. Then he and his university got sued by Advanced Biological Laboratories, a French firm which claims that its patents cover the use of computers to make diagnostic decisions. Stanford settled, but the doctor hasn't, starting the website and asking the patent office to re-examine and invalidate the patents. ABL's settlement with Stanford ends the suit against Dr Shafer and allows not-for-profit use of his database. Final irony in this outrage: the European Patent Office rejected the patents on the grounds they were obvious.
[Posted at 06/17/2009 09:26 AM by John Bennett on Blocking Technology 
comments(22)]
Comments
this interesting opinion on jdsalinger's court case:
http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/06/17/when-an-author-meets-an-author-coming-through-the-rye/
[Comment at 06/17/2009 10:53 AM by johnson]
Why not create a wiki patent system where anyone can write about their ideas? It can be rather free form. Anything first written in it, will be grounds for prior art for future trolls trying to patent things.
[Comment at 06/17/2009 06:35 PM by Huck Finne]
Huck:
The problem is that most ideas fail to meet the standard for invention. They are ideas, not an implementation. Faster-than-light is an idea, easy to imagine philosophically. Actually travelling faster-than-light by using a particular invention is a non-obvious way of accomplishing the idea (well, the tachyon FTL drive might be considered sort of obvious, considering the number of times it has been discused), and would be patentable (unless the idea provided the specifics of how to go faster-than-light.
[Comment at 06/19/2009 01:34 PM by Lonnie E. Holder]
Just wnate dto say that you website is very interesting, thank you for sharing information.
[Comment at 04/23/2010 08:41 PM by Katherine]
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