The Depressing Mayo v. Prometheus Oral Argument at the US Supreme Court
groklaw.net
groklaw.net
He was stunningly interrupted by the rookie Justice on the
far left seat, Justice Sotomayor. It was stunning since she
sounded so off-base. She asked about the “actual machine.”
In an argument about treatment, knowledge and diagnosis,
where neither the drug or the blood testing were at issue,
“machine” sounded uninformed. Our reporter looked down. He
was embarrassed for the Justice.Since justices do rely on clerks, it's not clear to me that an accomplished anything other than a judge could not be brought up to speed on the law.
It is a shame that the justices seem to avoid each other and do not appear to work in a team. Imagine a team of justices that could rely on one being an MD, one being a civil engineer, one being an entrepreneur that could lead/organize tutorial sessions for the others.
Many of the current justices don't even have courtroom experience.
But in terms of overseeing the law, are you saying non-lawyers should be ineligible to run for Congress?
Those clerks would be easy prey for lobbyists. "Here is a small gift, make sure to interpret this patent for Sotomayor using this kind of language and not that kind."
The other question that made sense was from Chief Justice Roberts:
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So I have a great idea. You take wood, you put it on a grate, you light it, and you get heat. That recites a series of acts performed in the physical world that transforms the subject of the process, the wood, to achieve a useful result, which is heat. So I can get a patent for that?
Believe it or not, the answer was no, not because it's not patentable subject matter, but because it's not novel. So cavemen entrepreneurs could have patented it?
But the point is.... if any medical device could license any patent (doesn't matter what patent it is) for no more than 5% of manufacturer->distributor sales price, there would still be reason to fight bogus patents, but prices would drop because you'd only get 5% of manufacturing royalties for 20 years, not 20 years of monopoly rights.
If you get rid of software patents, this problem becomes quite manageable in the medical world.
This is precisely what patents are designed to do: create monopolies.
But as usual with politics, it is easier to create more laws to try to patch up some of the consequences of a bad policy than to fix the actual policy. (All the laws intended to deal with the fallout from the failed Drug Prohibition are another good example.)
All this reminds me of how amusing it was when Microsoft was being persecuted for antitrust violations when their whole business model was based on copyright, which again is based on government granted monopolies.
But of course when the lives and health of people are involved the farce turns to tragedy.
That's half of what monopolies are supposed to do, in my layman's observation of the field (i.e. everything I know I learned on HN). The other half is to encourage the dissemination of innovation to the benefit of society.
What we have now is the first half, the monopoly. The second half is disappearing, replaced by patent holders preventing innovation from moving through society, and removing the use of what was once obvious from society.
[1] For example, through medicare reimbursement rates the government strongly influences the pay rates of different types of doctors, and mandates that the gap in wages between a GP and a specialist be about twice what it is in other countries, which results in the US having lots of specialists but a huge lack of GPs compared to other countries, which means we do a very poor job of catching problems early, etc. EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource-based_relative_value_s...
This is not a patch on the patent system. This is a fundamental change in moving from a monopoly grant to a grant of rent for research. This is a huge change. I'd be willing to trade moderate extension of patent terms (say to 25 years) to accomplish this.