Joseph Stiglitz | Intellectual Property Rights Gone Wild

[eridani]

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http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/17398-intellectual-property-rights-gone-wild

he Supreme Court recently began deliberations in a case that highlights a deeply problematic issue concerning intellectual property rights: Can human genes - your genes - be patented? Put another way, should someone essentially be permitted to own the right, say, to test whether you have a set of genes that imply a higher than 50 percent probability of developing breast cancer?

To those outside the arcane world of intellectual property rights, the answer seems obvious: No. You own your genes. A company might own, at most, the intellectual property underlying its genetic test; and, because the research and development needed to develop the test may have cost a considerable amount, the firm might rightly charge for administering it.

But a Utah-based company, Myriad Genetics, claims more than that. It claims to own the rights to any test for the presence of the two critical genes associated with breast cancer, and it has ruthlessly enforced that right, though their test is inferior to one that Yale University was willing to provide at much lower cost. The consequences have been tragic: Thorough, affordable testing that identifies high-risk patients saves lives. Blocking such testing costs lives. Myriad is a true example of an American corporation for which profit trumps all other values, including the value of human life itself.

This a particularly poignant case. Normally, economists talk about trade-offs: weaker intellectual property rights, it is argued, would undermine incentives to innovate. The irony here is that Myriad's discovery would have been made in any case, owing to a publicly funded, international effort to decode the entire human genome that was a singular achievement of modern science. The social benefits of Myriad's slightly earlier discovery have been dwarfed by the costs that its callous pursuit of profit has imposed.

[blkmusclmachine]

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[Egalitarian Thug]

2. Another Sad and Disgusted K&R n/t

[freshwest]

3. Myriad Genetics does not own the HGP. They are thieves. EOM.

[stuffmatters]

4. What occurs in nature or belongs to the commons should not be privatizeable IMHO

Who would ever have thought that employee pension funds could be Bained, WPA post offices Issa/Feinsteined,
seeds Montasantoed or national aquifers Keystoned.

I always liked that photo of SCOTUS wearing corporate stickers on their robes.

[think]

5. Here's hoping the court shows some respect for sanity

Because a corporation owning the patent rights on human genes is INSANE....