Examples and comparisons of the reinvention of patented inventions are presented and discussed, and a new patentable general-purpose controller described.
What is (and should be) patentable is the association between an allele or set of alleles and a phenotype.
However, market potential is not a necessary, much less a satisfactory, condition to determining whether something comprises patentable subject matter.
At bottom, the "detection" involved in the truffle and disease gene patents itself is not patentable.
Ethno-botanical information is usually not patentable on either a stand-alone basis, or as part of a patent for an 'invented' product.
A new idea is patentable only if there is an "illogical step," that is, a logically unjustified step.
Researchers are being required to operate explicitly as commercial agents, and a new culture of economic calculation is emerging around the patentable product.
This inevitably drives research in a certain direction because industry is only interested in funding, quite understandably, research that could lead to a patentable product.
