Re: [Patents] CNN: EC takes 8 states to court over biotech directive

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> Commission to take France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, the
> Netherlands, Austria and Luxembourg to court for not yet transposing the
>    1988 biotech patents directive.  Portugal also on the brink.
>
> http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/07/news/international/eu_biotech.reut/

CNN says "not transposed .. to the detriment of Europe's fledgling biotech
industry", thus uncritically citing CEC sources which are known to be
speaking in bad faith, see their monitoring report on the biotech
directive which they submitted to the Europarl in late 2001.

CEC confuses "biotech industry" and "biotech patent owners".

Prominent companies, scientists and associations have complained that the
biotech directive is a catastrophe because it is leading to overly broad
claims which are blocking innovation in the biotech field.

Unfortunately I am not aware of any website which presents the biotech
directive's problems in a systematic manner.

Maybe there is more to say in favor of gene patents than in favor of
software patents, but so far CEC as well as other proponents have AFAIK
failed to make the case.

The biopat directive is similar to the softpat directive in the way it
misleads people:

        <large>human genes are unpatentable.</large>

        <small>human genes are patentable as far as they can be reproduced
outside of the human body.</small>

Sounds like

        <large>algorithms are unpatentable</large>

        <small>algorithms are patentable when they are claimed with
reference to a physical environment</small>

This comparison might be nice as a motive for posters.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
155,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/