Supreme court to rule on patent for your thoughts

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" Zepp " <zepp

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:33:55 -0800

[Zepps_News] Supreme court to rule on patent for your thoughts

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1735743,00.html

 

*Supreme court to rule on patent for your thoughts*

 

*Oliver Burkeman in New York

Tuesday March 21, 2006

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*

 

The US supreme court is due to hear arguments in a case today that could

overturn thousands of controversial patents, after a lower court ruled

that doctors could infringe a drug company's ownership rights " merely by

thinking " about the relationship between two chemicals in the human body.

 

The case concerns a patent granted in 1990 to scientists at the

University of Colorado and Columbia in New York. They discovered that

high levels of an amino acid, homocysteine, in the blood or urine tended

to be associated with a deficiency of B vitamins. But their patent does

not just relate to the test they invented. It asserts their ownership of

the idea of correlating the two chemicals - leading to the charge that

they have patented a law of nature, rather than a human invention.

 

" Unfortunately for the public, the Metabolite case is only one example

of a much broader patent problem in this country, " the bestselling

novelist Michael Crichton wrote in the New York Times at the weekend.

" We grant patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise, and it's

gotten us into trouble in the past. "

 

The idea that even thinking about a correlation could infringe a patent

" smacks of thought control, to say nothing of unenforceability " , he added.

 

Allowing the trend to continue could be disastrous, he warned. " Do you

want to be told by your doctor, 'Oh, nobody studies your disease any

more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too

expensive to do research'? "

 

The current dispute began in 1998 after LabCorp, a medical testing firm,

stopped paying royalties to Metabolite Laboratories, which owns the

patent. LabCorp said it had started using a different testing method for

the same correlation, but Metabolite sued and won.

 

LabCorp was ordered to pay $7.8m (£4.5m) in damages, and is now asking

the supreme court to overturn that judgment.

 

If the court finds in favour of LabCorp, thousands of patents could be

at risk, including many of those granted in connection with the human

genome.

 

A number of medical, software and financial companies are supporting

Metabolite as " friends of the court " , suggesting that they too see

implications for their businesses if the court rules against the firm.

 

" The test itself is obvious when you have the correlation. It is the

discovery of the correlation that is the real novelty here, " Mark

Lemley, a Stanford University law professor who is helping represent

Metabolite, told the Washington Post.

 

But a pressure group called Patients Not Patents cited a recent patent

application for " a method of evaluating a risk of occurrence of a

medical condition in a patient, the method comprising: receiving a

patient dataset for the patient; and evaluating the dataset with a model

predictive of the medical condition " - which would, if granted, have

patented the most basic aspects of being a doctor.

 

 

 

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