'Luch' at this - a bump in the road for TRIPS

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday December 05, 2002 22:49 by Daithi

'Higher life forms' are not 'inventions', apparently

In a victory for opponents of overbroad intellectual property laws, the highest Canadian court rejected an attempt by researchers at Harvard to obtain a patent over a genetically modified mouse (and the process used to 'create' it)

This is the final stage in a long court battle between Harvard and campaigners (environmentalists, religious groups and groups opposed to the commercial appropriation of both nature and science) - two years ago a federal court overturned a refusal to grant a patent to Harvard - originally the patent office held that they could only grant patents for 'inventions', and the mouse in question was not such an invention. Today's split decision restores that ruling.

It's important to know that patents have been obtained in many other countries for this research - and there has of course been much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of the big scientific companies here in Canada, worried that their valuable IP rights will be undermined - the calls for Canada to "fall into line" with the rest of the world have come already.

Those who oppose this type of research in principle say that it will become economically unviable for it to be carried out without patent protection - while advocates of greater IP freedom, opponents of TRIPS, will say that this decision is important for another reason, acting as a warning to the biotech industry that life itself cannot be patented and that the results of this type of research are of such importance to humanity, they should be available freely to all scientists. Both camps agree that the Canadian parliament now has the opportunity to define the limits of patentability and indeed the moral/ethical limits of what is acceptable in science - and that the biotech industry will lobby hard to retain their unimpeded position of privilege and power.

Ironically this decision comes on the same day as a separate announcement about the mouse genome.

This is just a small obstacle in the way of the TRIPS juggernaut, but it is a sign of hope to some countries, in the developing world in particular, that are not prepared to accept that what can be protected in the US (and the EU) should be protected worldwide.

RESOURCES:

The full text of the case (summary provided and it is relatively readable, the majority (5-4 split) judgement is by Bastarache: see this address:

http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/rec/html/harvard.en.html (238K HTML)

Canadian Catholic Organisation for Development and Peace:
http://www.newswire.ca/releases/December2002/05/c0404.html

BIOTec Canada (who are very upset):
http://www.newswire.ca/releases/December2002/05/c0202.html

CBC (Canadian public broadcaster):
http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/12/05/scc_mouse021205