decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Can't patent a flawed machine? | 545 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Can't patent a flawed machine?
Authored by: frederik on Thursday, June 13 2013 @ 03:21 PM EDT
The point of the patent (for patent holder) is to exclude others to maximize
profits for self.

With BRCA1 as an example, the sequence has an exact specification about 5,500
nucleotides long. I could make a PCR test to extract the segment with a given
common mutation with two exactly specified 15-nucleotide primers. A patent for
that would be useless, since someone else can do it with another pair of
15-nucleotide primers in slightly different locations. Or 16-nucleotide primers.
Not useful for exclusion(*).

So, instead the patent aims to cover *any* [pair] of primers, 15 nucleotides or
longer from the BRCA1 [cDNA] sequence. That does exclude others from building
the test.

My point is that this is overbroad, not only because it covers sequences
naturally occurring in BRCA1 [court decision], but also because it covers many
sequences in other genes including genes previously patented by others
("prior art" [admittedly laughable].)


(*) PCR works because you use a pair of primers. Even if each primers also
matches elsewhere, it works as long as they do not both match elsewhere in close
proximity to each other. However, in the set of all possible BRCA1 sequence
primer pairs there will be some that amplify a segment of a completely
different, in some cases already patented, gene.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )