Wired.com has the scoop:

A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit can move forward against the Patent and Trademark Office and the research company that was awarded exclusive rights to human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer.

The first-of-its-kind lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law claims that the patents violate free speech by restricting research.

Three cheers for the judge!

More to read (along with documents and decision from the case) can be found HERE.

UPDATE: CourthouseNews.com has more interesting tidbits regarding the lawsuit HERE.

Much the most interesting piece on the financial debacle that I have read recently concerns Citigroup and its predecessors link here. It turns out to have been a source of rot in the financial system since the 1920s before the Great Depression. Somehow it always escapes reform, has to be rescued, and comes back to rip us off again.

"During the 1920s, the institution then known as National City Bank opened stores around the country to encourage the burgeoning middle class to invest in stocks and bonds. With little money down 10 percent of the cost of a trade was all an investor needed to buy shares investors poured into the stock market."

"Before the crash, industry practice allowed National City not only to underwrite securities but also to employ a sales army to peddle them to depositors." One response was passage of "the Glass-Steagall Act, separating activities of commercial banks (which offered plain old savings accounts and loans) from those of investment firms." "Although thousands of smaller banks failed, government policies to prop up the banking sector helped National City and other major banks weather the Depression."

During the 90's bank crisis from lending to Latin America, the company (then known as Citigroup) was saved by weakened capital and accounting rules and by low interest rates created by the FED.

It and other banks then used their clout to get Glass Steagall repealed. "By liberating our financial companies from an antiquated regulatory structure, this legislation will unleash the creativity of our industry and insure our global competitiveness," Mr. Sanford I. Weill and Mr. John S. Reed, Citigroup's co-chairmen and co-chief executives, said in a statement after repeal. "As a result, all Americans investors, savers, insureds will be better served."

We all know what happened then. The bank's health remains precarious and largely dependent on the government guarantee. But it is still resisting reform and opposing moves to split up the too-big-to-fail banks.

Because all studies say pretty much the same thing...and corrupt politicians chug along doing the opposite. Of course academics often speak softly.

Investments in Pharmaceuticals Before and After TRIPS by Margaret Kyle, Anita McGahan - #15468 (HE ITI PR)

Abstract:

We examine the relationship between patent protection for pharmaceuticals and investment in development of new drugs. Patent protection has increased around the world as a consequence of the TRIPS Agreement, which specifies minimum levels of intellectual property protection for members of the World Trade Organization. It is generally argued that patents are critical for pharmaceutical research efforts, and so greater patent protection in developing and least-developed countries might result in greater effort by pharmaceutical firms to develop drugs that are especially needed in those countries. Since patents also have the potential to reduce access to treatments through higher prices, it is imperative to assess whether the benefits of increased incentives have materialized in research on diseases that particularly affect the poor. We find that patent protection is associated with increases in research and development (R&D) effort when adopted in high income countries. However, the introduction of patents in developing countries has not been followed by greater investment. Particularly for diseases that primarily affect the poorest countries, our results suggest that alternative mechanisms for inducing R&D may be more appropriate than patents.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W15468

Two news stories this week inform us just how fragile the financial system still is. The longest appeared in two parts in the Seattle Times and traces the demise of WaMu, a major mortgage lender that went broke last year link here and here. The other story concerns the re-emergence of Maurice Greenberg, the "financier" who built AIG, lost it in a bid for control several years ago, still owns a lot of its stock, and is now fashioning a competitor, C V Starr, which apparently replicates AIG in its activities, in its style and its complex organization designed to obscure what is happening, and is now acquiring many former AIG employees link here.

The WaMu story shows how it went from profitable but healthy mortgage lending to increasingly risky subprime high interest paper that was sold by agents and approved with increasingly lax WaMu reviews. Recognizing that the profits depended on ever-rising real estate prices, WaMu moved to dump its own holdings of these mortgages through securitization but got caught with billions in mortgages it couldn't unload in 2007 when that market froze up in recognition of how poor these securities were.

The worrisome aspect of both these stories is that the financial regulators were oblivious of what was happening and that nothing has yet been done to prevent it from happening again. Read these stories and beware.

The recent Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) decision, Ex parte Rodriguez (discussed here), is a good example of the completely arbitrary, artificial nature of patent law. This is what counts as the meat and bones of natural "justice" in the IP world. This opinion discusses the relationship between the Patent Act's Sec. 112, 6th and 1st paragraphs, and clarifies why and under what conditions a functional claim limitation that is not a means-plus-function recitation may be invalid under Sec. 112, 1st para. for lack of enablement. Blah blah blah.

How anyone can think this is possibly compatible with libertarian principle is beyond me. No offense, Randians.

[SK cross-post]

"A Note on Intellectual Property and Externalities," by Hardy Bouillon, Mises Daily (Oct. 27, 2009), originally published in Property, Freedom and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (2009).

[SK cross-post]

Who Owns You? Corporations Patenting Your Genes

A debate between IP opponent David Koepsell and patent attorney Gene Quinn about gene patents. As noted in IP Debate? (see also Gene Quinn the Patent Watchdog and Is It So Crazy For A Patent Attorney To Think Patents Harm Innovation?), Quinn previously said he wanted to debate an IP opponent, before transparently banning me from his site after I called his bluff; then David Koepsell offered to debate Quinn--it was supposed to be held yesterday at Cardozo law school, but then Quinn backed out, and finally agreed to the online thing you see above. Good thing for him he was not there face to face to present his embarrassingly weak "arguments."

[SK cross-post]

File piracy is not limited to basement dwelling teenagers. According to an article in the The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, there are websites with a lively exchange of toll-gated articles from medical journals. People register and post request for articles by providing URLs. Good souls with subscriptions then post the requested PDFs. The article reports on an unnamed website with various discussion forums, some of which featured such requests. The author interprets the existence of such forums and the willingness of subscribers to help out as a clear signal that more open access to research is needed.

NB: The article reporting this is open access, no need to feel dirty when clicking on the link.

That is, until the obvious backlash comes.

Is there are clearer example of how anti-freedom copyright regulations have become? What bigger cornerstone of human freedom is there than to sing out loud to yourself?

The Performing Rights Society apologized to the woman, but what sort of twisted psychological conditioning was at work to make them even think that this was a problem in the first place?

Unbelievable.

Read it all here.