I just added it again to the homepage and the category pages. Still trying to figure out the right or best way to display it on the article pages themselves.

I hope all is well.

-Gene

I liked the (fleeting) feature of showing the number of visits to each thread next to the number of comments. Can this be restored?

“It is no bar to a finding of infringement that the patented object or process is a part of or composes a broader unpatented structure or process, provided the patented invention is significant or important to the defendant’s activities that involve the unpatented structure.”

This indicates that, at least under Canadian law, it is irrelevant whether or not you can patent a whole organism. Just patent a tiny piece of it and you have the same protection. However, I will admit to finding this point very confusing, since the decision swears up and down that you can’t patent the plant, as if this is a significant point.

If this is indeed the precipice of a slippery slope, and in the future some US court may extend these same rights out to animals or even humans, that means that patent owners can use IP rights to control the reproduction of animals or humans. I’m not saying we are currently in danger of having patents on humans. We’re not anywhere close to it. All I’m saying is that we may be wise to be very cautious about movements in that direction.

I think reference to the Schmeiser situation is extremely misleading. The courts in Canada repeatedly ruled that he infringed and that the knew or should have known that he was infringing.

The facts actually showed that Schmeiser is not the angel that many portray him to be. In fact, he intentionally sprayed a portion of his fields with Round Up and 60% of his crops did not die, which indicated to him that the Monsanto patented seeds were being used. He collected seeds from those surviving plants and then intentionally proceeded to infringe the patents. The Canadian courts also repeatedly rejected his theories with respect to how the Monsanto patented seeds allegedly “naturally” found way into his farm in the first place. In other words, the courts repeatedly found that Schmeiser was not honest and acted intentionally.

So you are right, we definitely need to be on the look out for Schmeiser-like activity and make sure that we prevent such illegal taking of patented innovations.

See:

http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/for_the_record/percy_schmeiser.asp

http://techyum.com/2007/12/monsanto_v_scheiser_1.html

Canadian Supreme Court Decision (you should really read this, it explains exactly what the Court found Schmeiser did, and how he was not believed and his actions were intentional.

While we don’t have a similar ruling in the US (to my knowledge), it may be prudent to be cautious of any movement in that direction by US courts. Such movement could potentially lead to a slippery slope where even higher forms of life can be controlled by patents.

“As a scientist, I’m unable to sequence BRCA1/2, whether it’s from a patient carrying the wild-type (normal) or mutant form. Myriad simply prevents me from doing that, because as soon as I sequence those genes, I will be infringing on their patent. Myriad did NOT create these naturally occuring substances, did NOT “tease” them in any way like Gene suggests in his previous article about gene patents, did NOT discover the method of isolation of these genes from tissues, and certainly did NOT discover the methodology they currently use in their diagnostic lab to identify mutations.

So I’m baffled as to how you guys can argue in favor of this patent.”

-Gene

I am unfortunately well aware of the disappearing comments. In an effort to focus on business I decided to hire a webhosting company nearby that could run my server and tend to the technical matters. This was a terrible decision and the nightmare began about 2 weeks ago. For reasons that are beyond my understanding my site never ran properly. There were database errors, site inaccessible and on Friday for a time all of the links when clicked took users to “page not found.” The errors would come and go randomly, I would complain, they would allegedly fix it, then it or something new would go wrong the next day. It got to a point where every day I was spending hours and hours trying to get answers, which were contradictory and provided little information other than “that shouldn’t happen again.” It happened repeatedly, I lost entire posts and yesterday when I settled into work I noticed that the site was again having troubles, not displaying properly and I decided I had to get back to a server I could manage and cut them loose. So yesterday the site was up, down and sideways much of the day. Now the site for some is pointing to my new server and for others to the old server, which hopefully will be rectified within a day or two. Right now I have to access things via wireless internet card because my ISP still delivers cache from the old server. It has been a nightmare!

I hope this will all stop soon and I can get back to writing, and working on business. I have had e-mail interruptions, business has suffered, and for the privilege of all this needless extra work I had to pay $515 I won’t get back.

Sorry for venting. I plan on posting on this in the coming days once I feel somewhat at ease that the “mistake server” is out of the loop and I am on a stable platform.

-Gene