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Are Patents "Monopolies"?
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| On occasion you get some defender of patents who is upset when we use the
| m-word to describe these artificial state-granted monopoly rights. For
| example here one Dale Halling, a patent attorney (surprise!) posts about "The
| Myth that Patents are a Monopoly" and writes, " People who suggest a patent
| is a monopoly are not being intellectually honest and perpetuating a myth to
| advance a political agenda."
|
| [...]
|
| Now it is, indeed, clear that a patent is a monopoly grant to someone that
| permits them to charge above-market prices; this is exactly the goal of the
| patent law: to provide this monopoly profit to inventors so as to incentivize
| them to innovate and file for patents. And it is why, for example, Blackberry
| paid over $600 million to NTP in a recent patent suit; and it is why
| consumers will have to pay more for Blackberry services than they otherwise
| would, etc. Did NTP have "monopoly power" as defined by the government's
| antitrust scheme? I don't know. Probably not. But did they extort
| RIM/Blackberry by use of the government-granted patent monopoly? Of course.
`----
http://blog.mises.org/archives/010272.asp
Self destruction:
Good Magazine Goes Bad: The Ethics of Patent Trolling
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| The nature of the claimed invention in these cases also raises serious
| questions about online rights. The Spangenberg companies, by suing hundreds
| of websites, have claimed a proprietary right over e-commerce itself. I'm not
| making that judgment based on an analysis of his patents—I'm making it based
| on the accusations in the lawsuits, filed against hundreds of companies that
| don't have anything apparent in common other than the fact that they sell
| stuff online. And while Spangenberg targets only big corporations, many of
| his imitators have no such scruples.
`----
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2009/07/good-magazine-profile-of-erich-spangenberg-misses-the-point.html
Recent:
harmfulpatents.org
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| More than 20 years after medical expert systems were first developed, the
| USPTO issued two patents simply on the concept of using a computer to help
| physicians choose medical treatments. A company that purchased these patents
| claims that "the diagnosis and treatment of most chronic diseases will fall
| under the claims of these patents." Already it has filed patent infringement
| suits against seven companies in three years and it threatened to sue a
| university for hosting a freely available HIV database. Perhaps most
| startling of all, that same university -- where much of the seminal research
| on expert systems took place -- entered into a licensing agreement intended
| to limit the use of the HIV database, which had been created by one of its
| own faculty.
`----
http://www.harmfulpatents.org/
Do Patents Kill? A Strange Twist in the Ramkumar vs Samsung Saga
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| A number of papers report that a death in Chennai could be connected with the
| ongoing Ramkumar vs Samsung (and others) patent litigation, a litigation that
| we have been tracking on this blog.
`----
http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-patents-kill-strange-twist-in.html
Related:
Patents Over Patients
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| Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit,
| not on their patentability.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/01moss.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Another Example Of Patents Putting Lives At Risk
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| Given that Shafer refused to live up to the terms of the deal that he had
| never agreed to in the first place, ABL moved forward and sued Shafer
| directly, and that case is now ongoing -- even as Shafer hopes to invalidate
| the patent through the Patent Office itself. The whole thing is yet another
| story of how patents are being used to stifle innovation -- and sometimes put
| lives at risk. It's tragic that we've been seeing so many such stories
| lately.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090610/2202565196.shtml
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