Could be worthwhile read...

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes



"Owning the Future" says we'll all be casualties of the wars being
waged over intellectual-property rights 

Greg Burkman
Special to The Seattle Times


You have cancer. A new drug company has developed an FDA-approved,
apparently successful treatment. But it's off-limits to your doctor
because a competing pharmaceutical firm, with no similar product of
its own, gets a court order to stop sales of the treatment - it
claims to own a part of the technological process used to create the
procedure that could help you. 

Or you're a farmer who for generations has replanted part of your
harvest as seed for next year's crop. But the agrochemical firm from
which you bought the seeds says you can't, because the company owns
the seed's genetic blueprint, even through its lines of future
generations. 

These incidents may seem drawn from some Orwellian nether world,
but, as Seth Shulman explains in his new book, "Owning the Future:
Staking Claims on the Knowledge Frontier", they're derived from
actual outcomes of intellectual-property litigation in the late
1990s. 

Citing examples in the fields of medical research, software
development, agricultural biotechnology, academic research and
pharmaceutical engineering, Shulman, a science reporter and
contributing writer for Technology Review, depicts a deeply
insidious "crisis in intellectual-property law" in which knowledge of
diverse procedures that should be freely available to all have come
to be owned by mini-monopolies and "gatekeepers of fiefdoms of
knowledge." 

This may sound like a paranoiac tabloid reader's playground, but
Shulman's book is impeccably documented and impressively concise,
considering its comprehensive scope. "Owning the Future" owes its
existence to a genuine, informed concern about a future monopolized
by a "system of parceling out ownership rights to intangible ideas."

A little of the book reads like urban myth: US Patent 5,707,114, for
example, granted in January 1998, guarantees a Connecticut inventor
the rights to the wheel, apparently issuing from an unknown motive
on the part of the inventor and gross incompetence on the part of
messy patent bureaucracies. 

The big picture is more sobering. For instance, thanks to what
Shulman portrays as an antiquated, overworked, and sloppy US Patent
Office, the patent system has been issuing dangerously broad
patents, enabling companies like Novartis, a giant Swiss drug
company, to own the rights to all ex vivo human-gene therapy (i.e.,
removing genes from a subject's body, manipulating them, and then
reintroducing them into the subject). Shulman calls the procedure "a
technique with potential applications ranging from treatments for
brain tumors to arthritis." Licensing this activity is akin to giving
someone a patent for the Heimlich maneuver and all of its future
uses. 

Shulman provides additional ominous examples of the new tendency to
commodify ideas. In 1989, when Compton New Media first introduced
Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, one of the earliest successful
CD-ROMs, the company had also filed for, and subsequently won, a
patent over all multimedia software. According to Shulman, the
software industry justifiably reviled the move (which applied to
indispensable features of any multimedia package) and compared it to
owning the rights to the English language. 

Similarly, in 1985, computer programmer Charles Freeny won a patent
on a system he designed that would allow people to buy products
online and have them delivered electronically. Freeny sold the
patent in 1989 for a song: $200,000. 

In 1994, an entrepreneur named Arnold Freilich snapped it up,
sensing its lucrative potential. He promptly set up an online gift
business called Interactive Gift Express Inc., under a shell company
named E-data. E-data is now more than a nuisance: It is a business to
which all companies who buy and sell over the Internet must pay
royalties. E-data has thus far targeted 75,000 organizations doing
business on the Web for lawsuits, and it has already sued several
powerful players, including CompuServe, the Internet provider; Dun
and Bradstreet, the financial firm; and publishers McGraw Hill and
Ziff-Davis. While netizens tend to loathe E-data, Shulman claims
that the cost of protracted lawsuits acts as a deterrent to fighting
the company. 

Shulman also tells the outrageous story of Agracetus, a
Wisconsin-based bio-tech firm that won a 1994 European patent
"affording the company exclusive rights for the next two decades to
any and all genetically altered soybeans, created by theirs or any
other method that might be developed." 

Most disturbing, however, is the patenting of genetic information
derived from humans by "bioprospectors" like corporations and the
U.S. government. The implications are chilling: Is it too
far-fetched to believe that "the road ahead" will also include people
who, in the most profound sense, are property of CEOs and the state? 

Shulman chronicles the events leading up to all these dubious
triumphs with clarity and the astringent, lively prose of good
reporting. He has done a commendable and responsible job of
investigating millennial knowledge brokers, exposing not only the
appallingly blithe pseudo-idealism of futurist cyber-capitalists
like Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler, but also the cynical elitist
arrogance of patent-exploiters like Arnold Freilich, the president
and CEO of a company that does nothing but capitalize on its patent
on computer commerce. Freilich: "I hate being called a leech. But
such is life." 

"Owning the Future" also outlines some of the consequences of
business as conducted by the knowledge elite: inevitable, costly
patent-infringement lawsuits drive up consumer prices; research is
zealously guarded, rather than shared by peers; and, most important,
knowledge, which can prosper only by common use, atrophies into mere
private property. 

Eminently readable and entirely unacademic, "Owning the Future"
sounds a clarion call, one that is particularly pertinent in the
present climate of merger-mania and anti-trust scrutiny. Shulman's
book inspires a radical sanity that urges us to get beyond "the
vision of a decentralized, self-correcting free-market knowledge
bazaar," insisting instead on the moral spirit of Jonas Salk. When
asked by Edward R. Murrow who would control his polio vaccine, Salk
replied, "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" 

Greg Burkman is a Seattle writer and critic. 

Copyright c 1999 Seattle Times Company







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