Rounding Up Plant Patents & Other Growing Patent Concerns a Comment on Monsanto v. Schmeiser
Emir A. C. Mohammed On the heels of their ubiquitous and controversial decision in Harvard College v. Canada (Commissioner of Patents) (the so-called ‘Harvard Mouse’ case), the Canadian Courts were soon asked to re-consider the issues surrounding the patentability of biotechnological inventions in Monsanto v. Schmeiser. Unlike Harvard Mouse, this matter was an infringement action. At the Trial Division, the crux of the action lay with Schmeiser’s alleged failure to obtain a license Monsanto’s patented “Roundup Ready Canola” (a canola seed tolerant of glyphosate herbicides including Monsanto’s own “Roundup”). “The infringement alleged is by the defendants using, reproducing and creating genes,...
Repairing the Bayh-Dole Act: A Proposal for Restoring Non-Profit Access to University Science
Aaron Miller The United States government invests billions of dollars every year in scientific research. Government agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA and the Pentagon directly employ legions of scientists and engineers. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds a tremendous amount of biomedical research. Besides running its own labs, the NIH gives generous grants to hundreds of universities and medical schools, and to the thousands of research professors who fill them. The federal government today provides about 60% of the total research funding for America’s many prestigious research universities. In addition, the government pays private, for-profit contractors...
Copyright Protection of Biotechnology Works: Into the Dustbin of History?
James G. Silva Starting in the early 1980s, and ending in the very beginning of the 1990s, a number of scholarly commentators proposed that biotechnology works are proper subject matter for copyright protection. Typically, these commentators focused on the idea that DNA sequences may be copyrightable works of authorship. Many commentators argued that copyrighting biotechnology might be a good idea because it would allow protection of works that would not qualify for patent protection. The idea of copyrighting biotechnology arose in the early 1980s at the time when patent protection of biotechnology seemed doubtful. Analogies of computer programs and DNA...