Patents no longer just for technology/Defense of Personhood Amendment.

[lostnfound]

Rawstory had a link to this article and there's a related article here.

The title of the first is "Patent Board Eliminates 'Technological Arts' Requirement For Business Method Patents" and it says:

This decision will once again expand the role of business method patents by freeing them from being tied to a computer or other electronic device. At the same time, this decision widens the gap between the US and many other countries who are still debating patentability of software.

Like horses, the intellectual talents of our era have been tightly harnessed -- human beings transformed into "intellectual capital". I feel that this is a great loss. This is just the latest step. The desire to capitalize everything has yielded patents on everything as well as copyrights extended beyond the typical lifespan of an author -- i.e., royalties required to sing the 'Happy Birthday' song on TV.

If previous eras had these laws in place, Mendeleev's Table of the Periodic Elements would not have appeared in chemistry textbooks..
Think about the army of programmers behind Microsoft Windows and conversely the army of programmers building Linux open-source software. Think about "standing on the shoulders of giants". Think about DNA sequencing and the patents on life -- on seeds, on DNA code -- that have been granted. What a loss of the richness of life, that so few are able to see their work added to the heritage for the next generation.

Of course, patents are a useful tool to reward innovation and give temporary shelter to competitive pressures for those products whose development costs are high but whose entry costs are low. But with corporate control over our government, "balance" does not consider the spiritual and intellectual life of a culture but only the economic balance between competing financial interests. Corporatists will mold the laws until they can squeeze the last drops of profit from the intellects that they employ, until there is nothing left but dust.

While patents of "business methods" may sound dry as dust anyway, I suspect this will result in yet more legal handcuffs on employees who change companies (and carry methods with them), and will reduce innovation and competition. And it carries us further down the path of believing that all good things come from the corporate god.

I think that the left should consider a 'Defense of Personhood Amendment' as a counter to the DOMAs that the rightwingers are using to get their base out to the polls. The rights of personhood ought not be conveyed upon artifical persons. Not on financial entities that do not bleed, die, lose sons and daughters in wars; who have no need to sleep/eat/drink/breathe every day of their lives, and no need for meaning.

[eallen]

1. Artificial persons aren't people? Did you ever see Blade Runner?

I'd be very careful how such an amendment were phrased. I'd go for something like this: "Corporate entities and other purely legal constructs are not to be construed as persons." We're not too many decades from the possibility of artificial persons in a more substantive and concrete sense. I'd be very leary of ruling their rights away at this point.

[lostnfound]

2. I like that language. Sounds good to me. nt