another link from Wired this morning: pro bono group’s challenge to patent on naturally-occurring genetic material allowed to proceed:

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.

Allowing patents on genes isolated from living things is bad policy, because it delays and imposes costs on important research even while it raises administrative costs by promoting speculative land-rush patent filing. The patent act was never meant to encompass natural phenomena, and the last 20 years of biotech patenting can only be explained by the fact that 20 years ago, patent examiners and judges didn’t understand the science well enough to reject these claims on the grounds that the claimed “invention” was occurring on its own, naturally, without human intervention.

Hopefully this is just another sign of an ongoing rollback in the scope of patentable subject matter. If Bilski ends the era of business method patents, it will probably have the collateral effect of putting a stake through the heart of software patents at the same time. If this case about gene patents is also carried through effectively, we’ll have come a long way back towards sanity in the US patent system.

And, incidentally, created a lot of work for patent litigators specialized in challenging business method, software, and gene patents on behalf of new market entrants.

I’m thinking that negotiating a secret treaty that will strip rights from internet users to pacify movie studios is a pretty good way to make sure that it’s eventually rejected by the American people.

The really choice fact missing from this article is: it was the same officer who tazered the protester last year.

A Chinese college student shocked by a Eugene police officer’s Taser stun gun a few hours after the student moved into his new apartment has contacted attorneys to represent him in the case.

The male student, a Chinese citizen who began attending language training classes last month at the University of Oregon, was confronted Sept. 22 inside his West 11th Avenue rental townhouse by police officers who thought he and his roommate were trespassing.

During the encounter, one of the officers used a Taser to subdue the student, who does not speak English.

because, hah! that’s fantastic:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/04/three-armed-baby-cos.html

The Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners published this short article summarizing the features of Michigan’s castle doctrine law. This is not legal advice.

I passed!

always has been. last time i spent almost six months pushing resumes and searching job websites before something reasonably good came up. of course, that time i actually still had a job and was just looking for its replacement. this time it’s like starting from scratch again.

oh well. bar results come out a week from today. i feel kinda sick just thinking about it.

ok, sure, Yoo gave shitty advice and some people got tortured. And some of the torture victims inconveniently died. Which would be, you know, murder, if we recognized the victims as human beings. Which John McCain and at least three members of the Supreme Court don’t. But I digress.

The question Dean Edley must answer is: was Yoo’s advice so shitty that he should be fired by Berkeley?

In a word, yes. Unfortunately for Dean Edley, the answer is transparently, obviously, clearly yes. Yoo’s DOJ opinions were so shockingly and mendaciously incompetent- he neglected cases that were directly on point, cases that are learned by every first-year law student at every accredited law school in this United States- that he is either (a) too fucking stupid at law to be allowed to continue teaching it to other people, let alone practice it himself or (b) guilty of willfully ignoring or misconstruing the law, which is an infraction of dishonesty subject to discipline by disbarment or being held in contempt. This wasn’t just a case of “oops, my bad, forgot about Youngstown.” He wrote shitty opinions on purpose, conforming them to the specs that were demanded by Cheney or Addington. But “I wass just followink ordursss!” is not a valid legal defense.

Either way, Yoo must be punished. The Dean of Berkeley law has no business defending him- in fact, the Dean should be shoving others off the podium in order to assert that Yoo is a disgrace to the legal profession and to the US Constitution, and demand that Yoo be charged with the war crimes in which he is so obviously complicit.

Shame on you, Christopher Edley. A member of your faculty who has unrepentantly distorted the law to justify torture can’t be credibly defended by an appeal to “academic freedom.” He’s a war criminal for christsakes- there is no zone of twilight here. You’ve got bigger problems on your hands than whether or not Johnny Yoo was the “decider.” This pissy little email just ain’t gonna cut it.

even though the pic is actually of a sunset, i’m going to choose to interpret this as a marker that the sun is rising.

This is one of those questions that has bothered me ever since the DeCSS thing went down way back in 2001. The crux of the problem is this: the movie industry wants to sell you a DVD like it’s a physical object, and then use technology to restrict your use as though you have taken a license to the content.

If they are selling you the physical object, they can’t complain when you decide to make a backup of the content- it’s classic fair use.

If they are selling you a license, they either need to (a) give you the option to negotiate the license, or put it on the outside of the product packaging, or (b) replace the physical media at cost (a few cents) when it becomes damaged, because your license has nothing to do with the physical media.

Right now, the industry is trying to claim that it gets to work the deal both ways, depending on which context is more favorable to them in any given situation. The facts of this case make it sound like it’s ripe to really treat the issue properly.

SAN FRANCISCO – Hollywood studios told a federal judge here Friday consumers have no right to make copies of their DVDs.

The U.S. courts, however, have never squarely answered whether that was true, a legal vacuum that might be answered in the Motion Picture Association of America’s lawsuit against RealNetworks.