New Bill Would Bring Back Terrible Software and Genetic Patents
By Joe Mullin,
Electronic Frontier Foundation
| 08. 18. 2022
A recently introduced patent bill would authorize patents on abstract ideas just for including computer jargon, and would even legalize the patenting of human genes. The “Patent Eligibility Restoration Act,” sponsored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), explicitly overrides some of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the past 15 years, and would tear down some of the public’s only protections from the worst patent abuses.
Pro-patent maximalists are trying to label the Tillis bill as a “consensus,” but it’s nothing of the sort. We need EFF supporters to send a message to Congress that it isn’t acceptable to allow patent trolls, or large patent-holders, to hold our technology hostage.
We Don’t Need ‘Do it on a Computer’ Patents
Starting in the late 1990s, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit essentially did away with any serious limits on what could be patented. This court, the top patent appeals court in the U.S., allowed patents on anything that produced a “useful result,” even when that result was just a number. This allowed for a period of more than...
Related Articles
By Anumita Kaur [cites CGS’ Katie Hasson], The Washington Post | 03.25.2025
Genetic information company 23andMe has said that it is headed to bankruptcy court, raising questions for what happens to the DNA shared by millions of people with the company via saliva test kits.
Sunday’s announcement clears the way for a new...
By Peter Wehling, Tino Plümecke, and Isabelle Bartram
| 03.26.2025
This article was originally published as “Soziogenomik und polygene Scores” in issue 272 (February 2025) of the German-language journal Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst (GID); translated by the authors.
In mid-November 2024, the British organization Hope not Hate published its investigative research ‘Inside the Eugenics Revival’. In addition to documentating an active international “race research” network, the investigation also brought to light the existence of a US start-up that offers eugenic embryo selection. Heliospect Genomics aims to enable wealthy couples to...
By Frank Landymore, Futurism | 03.18.2025
You can only throw so much money at a problem.
This, more or less, is the line being taken by AI researchers in a recent survey. Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general...
By Craig S. Smith, Forbes | 03.08.2025
One recent evening in Shenzhen, a group of software engineers gathered in a dimly lit co-working space, furiously typing as they monitored the performance of a new AI system. The air was electric, thick with the hum of servers and...