Something for Nothing

 

“. . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries . . .”
― an excerpt from Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution.

Recently the pharmaceutical company Allergan cut a deal with the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe of upstate New York to hold the patent for one of its drugs in order to protect the company from patent challenges. The reasoning behind the deal is that since Native American tribes have sovereign immunity from some types of lawsuits under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution, Allergan is protecting itself from expensive and sometimes unwarranted litigation relating to its patent. In return, the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe will receive millions of dollars up front, and millions more in royalties. Since this is a new type of arrangement, it’s unclear how well it will hold up in court.


Collection of United States patents granted to Thomas A. Edison, 1869-1884 (1869) (14570066720)
Illustration for an 1881 patent granted to Thomas Edison for an improvement to the incandescent light bulb he had first patented in 1880, itself an improvement built on the work of Canadian inventor Henry Woodward. Edison collected 2,332 patents worldwide, many of them for incremental improvements such as the one pictured here.

 

Patent infringements and patent challenges are nothing new, but with the explosion in technical innovations, new drugs, and medical devices in the past thirty years or so, the amount of infringement and challenge cases in the courts have exploded as well. Widespread patent trolling is a new phenomenon, tying up court dockets with often tenuous claims by some patent holders that their patent rights have been violated by another party.

The troll in this circumstance is usually an affiliation of lawyers sometimes known as a Non-Practicing Entity (NPE), which does not make or sell anything, but collects patents for the leverage that gives them in either extracting (extorting) licensing fees or lawsuit settlements from other parties. The patents used suit the purpose because they are overly broad and general, leaving plenty of room for interpretation by the courts, and the victims are often small to medium sized businesses which can’t afford the millions in lawyers’ fees and court costs it would take to defend themselves, instead choosing the easier and cheaper route of ponying up the licensing fee to the troll.

It’s hard to find fault with the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe for agreeing to the deal with Allergan. Native American tribes are often poor, their reservations pushed onto marginally productive land, and if they can take advantage of their status as sovereign nations within the United States to make some money, then more power to them. That same sovereign nation status, after all, has usually proved a mockery as European immigrants violated treaty after treaty with the Native Americans in pursuit of land and natural resources, taking what they liked with military force if words would not suffice.


Allergan, on the other hand, is doing what American companies seemingly do best, which is to cleverly exploit a loophole in the system. Whether Allergan is protecting itself from trolls or planning on doing the trolling itself from its newly purchased protected perch, that is yet to be seen. Large companies, such as Apple, can be both targets and perpetrators, though as perpetrators it’s often in the sense of patent infringement rather than trolling.

 

Self-operating napkin (Rube Goldberg cartoon with caption)
This cartoon of a “self-operating napkin” machine by Rube Goldberg originally appeared in the September 26, 1931 issue of Collier’s Magazine.

There’s plenty of gray area involved, and that’s where legislators need to step in to more clearly define the lines and reduce the amount of trolling lawsuits. Congress has acted in the past several years by changing the laws in favor of genuine innovators and against NPEs. More needs to be done, such as making the loser in a lawsuit pay the legal fees of both sides if the judge determines that one side has acted with intent to harass and extort the other.

This film of less than two minutes demonstrates Wallace’s endless enthusiasm for Goldbergian contraptions, much to the dismay of his dog, Gromit.

Some states have enacted such legislation, but where the case gets decided in a federal court, such as would be the situation should Allergan get challenged or challenge another party, the proceedings are not as clear due to fluid interpretations of the 11th Amendment. It appears that besides tightening up the rules governing patents, the next step is for Congress and the States to clarify the 11th Amendment to take away the sovereign immunity loophole. It’s unfortunate that Native American tribes would be denied a source of revenue, but patent parking really is a shady deal that needs to be stopped before it goes too far, similar to what has happened with the entrenchment of offshore tax havens for corporations.
― Techly

 

You Are What You Eat

 

The garden catalog dreambooks are starting to arrive in the mailboxes of home gardeners as 2016 ends and 2017 begins. Those gardeners who have ordered from online companies in the past and haven’t unsubscribed from their email list are receiving notices in their inboxes. Winter is the time to sit indoors in warmth and comfort and look over the seeds and plants on offer, either by scrolling through websites or paging through catalogs.

 

Some garden suppliers tout their seeds as being “not GE” or “non-GMO,” by which they mean the seeds are not Genetically Engineered or produced from Genetically Modified Organisms. Of course they’re not, since those kinds of seeds are available only to commercial growers, not to home gardeners. A different, though somewhat related, concern some gardeners have is whether the money they are spending on seeds will ultimately line the pockets of Monsanto and a few other large agribusinesses because those companies hold the patents on thousands of seed varieties.

PLANT A VICTORY GARDEN. OUR FOOD IS FIGHTING - NARA - 513818
World War II poster from the
Office for Emergency Management

Home gardeners can allay their concerns on both counts by doing a little research on their suppliers. The GMO concern is easier to dismiss than the one regarding the ultimate source of the seed. The best thing is to rely on suppliers of heirloom varieties or on open source suppliers who create and share new varieties without taking out a patent.

Deposit Seed Co Victory Garden Catalog 1944 - Flickr - USDAgov
Deposit Seed Co. Victory Garden Catalog 1944;
poster from the USDA National Agricultural Library

A much larger concern for everyone, gardeners and non-gardeners alike, is the prevalence of GMO foods in supermarkets and restaurants. Gardeners at least can sidestep that by growing as much of their own food as possible. Everyone else needs to watch what they buy in the stores, and that is where labels stating “not GE” or “non-GMO” are most helpful since agribusiness has successfully fought off attempts to label some foods as “GE” or “GMO.” Agribusiness executives apparently believe, not without reason, that as the general public becomes better informed about these products it might come to view such labels with the same alarm as a skull and crossbones. Not good for business.

 

To cite the most prominent example of GMO products, there are the Roundup Ready crops of corn, soybeans, and cotton, which today constitute upwards of 90% of the supply grown in the United States. No one eats cotton, though as Joseph Heller portrayed with the character of the amoral capitalist, Milo Minderbinder, in his marvelous satirical novel Catch-22, it is not too farfetched to think of someone like that trying to convince people to eat cotton if he senses a profit in it. For the corn and soybeans that we do eat, and in prodigious amounts if we eat a lot of processed foods, where they are ubiquitous, the federal government has mandated supposedly safe levels of Roundup. Frankenfoods, indeed.


Lastly, gardeners who care about the fertility of their soil as well as their own health and the health and vitality of the plants they grow for food would do well to avoid using herbicides in their home garden. No matter what, there will always be weeds wherever gardeners and farmers cultivate fertile conditions for favored plants. Scientists have not yet discovered any weeds growing in the sterility of the Moon.
– Izzy