DNA patenting

For a long time I have felt that the idea that a company can come along and patent a DNA sequence struck me as ridicoulous, unjust and unfair. Sadly, the people in charge at the responsible patent offices did not see it as such and they allowed companies to not only patent sequences that they "discovered" but restricted other organisations from doing any work on those genes.
Happily, a lawsuit in the US is challenging a particular decision to issue such a patent to Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City. More info on the lawsuit can be found in this article from the New York Times. What the lawsuit is arguing is that gene patents actually restrict the practice of medicine and new research. I would go a step further, by what moral right does a company get to take out a patent on my basic makeup? It is enough that they have found the gene in question and it is only fair that they should be able to recover their research costs as well as make a profit for the financial risk they took in carrying out this research, but to get a patent on the gene so that no-one else can do any additional research is obscene.
What is particularly disturbing and dangerous about this idea of patenting individual geme sequences is that at the moment research is being done on individual sequences looking at singular effects. But what happens when someone is trying to do research on something that requires the analysis of the effects of one gene on another? and what if one wants to analyse the effects of multiple gene sequences? They have to get permission from each organisation that has patented each of the genes they would want to test. I can imagine large corporations would strugle to contact 2-20,000 patent holders and get the appropriate licences, but smaller labs would not have the resources to do any such research to the detriment of all of us.
I hope Myriad loses this lawsuit, I would like to see the whole gene patent system abolished and something fair put in its place.

Patents Being Abused To Put Your Life In Danger

Bob Austin, who for many years has worked in major metropolitan fire and EMS departments, had the idea of creating an open source medical dispatch system. Such a system would have numerous benefits. Beyond being a free system, it also would allow best practices to easily bubble up in a way that actively would help save lives. If another EMS department could improve on the system, they easily could do so and contribute it back to the community.

One of the parts of the system was a project called Cards 911, which was a useful document for use by emergency dispatchers. Basically, it gave them a simple script to follow when an emergency call came in, asking where they were, the nature of the emergency, how many people injured, etc. The answers to certain questions would lead the dispatcher to different parts of the document using hyperlinks. The entire document (and, yes, it was just a document) was created in OpenOffice Writer and was offered either as a document file or a PDF file. In other words, this was basically a script with hyperlinks in it, that helped an emergency dispatcher get the necessary information, and help the caller as quickly as possible -- and it was free and open.

Who could possibly complain about that?

Apparently the lawyers for a company called Priority Dispatch Corporation, who sent a legal nastygram listing out ten patents that the company held, which the lawyers implied the Cards 911 project violated. Remember, this is a script written as a document. The lawyers were careful never to actually say which of the ten patents the cards violated, but simply listed them all out and said "Our investigation has revealed that the... Guide Cards may infringe on one or more of Priority Dispatch's patents and/or copyrights." Not only that, but the lawyers then demanded that all physical and electronic copies of the documents be destroyed.

Given the position they were in, as open source developers doing this for the good of the public, rather than as any sort of business endeavor, the folks involved in the project complied with the demands of the lawyer. They destroyed everything, both electronic and physical and agreed not to work on any emergency dispatch systems in the future. The project is no longer available, and our emergency dispatch systems are that much worse off because of it.

Furthermore, in investigating this further, it appears that it would be impossible to craft any sort of competing product that lives up to NHTSA and ASTM official standards without violating Priority Dispatch's patents, based on the what the company seems to believe they cover. If you would like to see all ten patents for yourself, they're listed here:

• 5857966
• 7106835
• 6607481
• 6106549
• 6078894
• 6076065
• 6053864
• 6010451
• 6004266
• 5989187

The whole situation is rather sickening, and I'm really hoping that folks here might be able to help see if we can get this project back on track. Priority Dispatch's decision to scare these open source developers into submission for merely offering up a free project to help save lives is really a rather disgusting use of the patent system, and obviously goes against the very purpose of that system: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Instead, such things are being actively stymied in a way that puts all of us at risk.

The folks working on this project have no money (and no intention of making any money from the project), but they could use some help. In my discussions with them, they simply wanted me to know about their story, and weren't asking for help per se, but it would be great if we could, as a community, come up with ways to get this project moving again, so that we can all be safer. If anyone has thoughts or ideas on how to help Bob, please let us know in the comments, and let's see what can be done. At the very least, please help spread this story and let others know about it.

eHow terms and conditions

I was reading an article on line about writers who are able to write short (400-600) word articles for eHow and they get rewarded based on the revenue generated by the article online or by the page views. I did not get in any detail into the exact remuneration process. I was amazed at the contract that these writers sign. Here are some excerpts from the contract which may be found here.

You retain ownership of your copyrights and other intellectual property and proprietary rights in any Content you post to the Site, subject to the non-exclusive rights that you grant to us as described in these Terms.

So, you retain ownership but we are going to do what we please with your copyright. Fair enough, you are paying for it so…hang on, are you paying for it?

Your decision to participate in the Writer Compensation Program described in Section 6 hereof and receipt or failure to receive any money thereunder, which is offered to you at eHow's sole discretion, will not affect your license granted to eHow under this Section.

So, you may not receive any money at our discretion but we are going to do with your work as we please.

You also hereby waive any moral rights you may have in such Content under the laws of any jurisdiction.

Wow, ok.

You agree that we may (but are not obligated to) display your Content, and your username or your actual name (according to the preferences you select at the time that you register) along with your Content.

So, if you like my article, you are going to be able to publish it under some others name and I (who you say can retain ownership of your copyrights and other intellectual property and proprietary rights) can not object to this.
After reading the following item in the supplemental terms of use I gave up on them.

We sincerely hope you will take this opportunity to write articles that are valuable to our users and, in the process, earn money! It's in our best interest to keep you coming back to write more articles to earn more money. HOWEVER, BY PARTICIPATING IN THE WCP, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT EHOW WILL DETERMINE, IN ITS SOLE DISCRETION, HOW MUCH MONEY (IF ANY) YOU EARN FOR THE ARTICLES THAT YOU POST.

Anyone wishing to work with them, I wish you luck.

Big pharma

Listened to a conversation today about the high costs of medications and the impact they are having on health services all over the world as well as individuals. The argument, as always, was that big pharma was charging way too much for life saving medications and the counter to that was “well, yes, but they do have high R&D costs that they need to cover”, hence the justification that the inventor of a new drug should get a monopoly for a number of years and during that period they should be allowed to charge what they please so that the costs are covered and a healthy profit to boot.
Well, yes, but there are some fundamental flaws with this argument. The first one I can come up with is that there is a built in incentive with the present system for big pharma not to try and discover cures but rather medications that will alleviate the effects of conditions/diseases. This would mean that they would be able to charge a lot more over the lifetime of the patient who would need to come back and buy more of the product. Cure the patient and you never see him again.
The second problem is that the present system incentivizes big pharma to concern themselves with R&D on diseases of the wealthy. Imagine their investing millions on a new malaria treatment where the client base can hardly afford their next meal. Given a choice of spending R&D resources on malaria treatments or boldness then you can imagine that the search for the boldness treatment would win in most cases.
One interesting proposal I heard of recently (one that sadly I do not think has a hope in hell of happening) is changing the system so that new products would come in one of two classifications. One would be of cures for diseases, where the medication would be offered at a very low price, the cost of production with no R&D element taken into consideration, but the incentive for the pharma company would be that they reach as many people as possible as their final reward would depend on the final number of people benefiting. This reward would then be quite substantial and would be paid out by a number of governments under some UN scheme.
The next classification would be for non disease medications where the pharma company would be able to, much the same as in today’s environment, reap the monopoly benefits of a patent for a number of years.
I am pretty sure that loopholes would be found and exploited in such a system, but at least it would be better than the present system we have going that sees big pharma getting richer and richer at the expense of untold third world lives.

TurboTax

It is the time of year when I need to start on my tax returns and I was thinking of software that I have used in the past. Of course Intuit came to mind and they have a product right now called TurboTax with the latest changes required to make your 2008 / 2009 returns. What suprised me even more is that Intuit is announcing its figures this week and do you know, they are a 3.1 billion dollar company now?

Well, I thought I would look into them a little more in detail and guess what, this year I think they have managed to turn on themselves. They had a great set of products and Turbo tax was certainly one of them. For many years people would pay a tax advisor or accountant to do their books for them and it was hard enough to persuade them to do it all themselves by using a piece of software. But Intuit did a good job over the years of persuading people to use their doftware and of course once people used it they realised that it was not as painful as previously thought and so year after year they would come back to the annual updates and new releases that just kept themoney flowing.

This year however, in an attempt to get more money out of their customers, Intuit changed the rules of the game. Intuit tried
to re-position its business as a provider of tax services rather than
that of a software vendor. The first mistake was to significantly
increase the price of Turbo Tax, thinking tha by adding “free”
federal e-filing to the package people would be prepared to pay. This backfired badly. Many customers
didn’t care about e-filing, so they perceived they were been charged
for a feature they didn’t want to start with.

Then, realising that most users of the TurboTax were not only doing their own books, but for other family members too, Intuit decided to start charging for each Tax return printed. Well, as you can imagine, the previously loyal customers started  defecting to the competition, in this case H&R Blocks Tax Cut.

Intuit realised their mistake and slashed their prices as well backtracked on their intention to charge for each Tax return print. However, H&R Block in a briliant move, dropped their prices, and sent out their Premium Federal Tax Cut version for free to tens of thousands of consumers.

On top of all this H&R has an advertising campaign "You've got people" that goes to the heart of the problem. Doing your tax returns is a difficult and emotional enough task at the best of times, and their message tries to humanise the process a little.

So, I say sell Intuit and buy H&R Block :-)

Surfing in the snow

I am sure that 365 days a year you will find people surfing in the English Garden in Munich. This is a canal off the Isar that flows through the English garden and at this particular point the water forms a wave that is great if one wants to practice their surfing technique.



These 2 guys were at it this morning and there is a third just out of the picture. A few minutes later a girl joined them and one of these guys packed it in for the day. He stood barefoot in the snow and slowly took off the wet gear, stood half naked and dried himself whilst watching his friends. I caught a cold just watching him. Oh did I forget to mention that the temperature was about -5C and with the wind chill factor it was more like -15C. The water is freezing cold all the year through. The Alps that feed it are justa few Km down the road and this river is practicaly a straight line to them.
Respect to these people, I could not do it.

Her Morning elegance / Oren Lavie

What a lovely video. Well made and I love the music.