I will agree that the patent system in the US is flawed, but I don’t think Amazon’s 1-click patent is the best example of that.
One of the problems I have with the US system as it exists now is that it doesn’t open up the patent application to third parties before it gets granted. The patentee submits its application and the PTO uses its own body of knowledge (including prior art searches) to determine whether it’s patentable or not, and that’s it. Opening the application process to third parties would help bring prior art to the PTO that the PTO might not find on its own, thus making it harder to get a patent.
But the 1-click patent has been back before the PTO in the reexamination process, in which third parties do get to explain to the PTO why they think the patent shouldn’t have been granted in the first place and the PTO is apparently going to reissue the patent anyway with only minor modifications. So in that particular case, it would appear that the patent would have been granted (as slightly modified, admittedly) even if the original application had been opened to third parties. (As I understand it, the modifications limit the scope of the patent to a shopping-cart transaction model, instead of just e-commerce transactions in general.)
Again, I’m not familiar with the specifics of the 1-click patent battle, but there has been a lot of money spent fighting over it. Seems to me that if the patent was so obvious, someone would have convinced the PTO of that. I’d be interested in hearing why you think the patent is so bad, though.
And lest I get accused of being a shill for the PTO, I will readily admit that it does grant patents it shouldn’t. Those tend to get sorted out pretty quickly in litigation, though.
Like I said in my most recent post, bad patents do get through. And this is exactly the patent I had in mind when I said that patents are “generally” more nuanced. And it’s a good example of why relying on the PTO’s body of knowledge alone is not the best system. One would expect, though, that someone at the PTO would have swung side to side as a kid, instead of just forwards and backwards.
Still, the claims in that patent were later canceled in a re-exam, so the system does usually work, eventually.
If American versions flood the market, the competition would probably kill the fledgling industry in Africa. This would mean more people out of work, unused fields, and even more people starving and reduced to relying on handouts. As Ace309 noted, the patent is about nutritional autonomy. The idea of feeding all of the poor, starving children in the world is a fundamentally noble idea, but taking away the patents only results in a population that will be forever reliant on American supplies. What would happen if one day, the American supplies dried up?
The problem with food aid in general is that they can often exacerbate food shortage problems by flooding markets in the short term and putting local farmers out of business. Needless to say, this is bad for their long term food growth potential and their economic health. Less farmers = less local food = more reliance on food aid. It’s a bad cycle. Food aid needs to be thought of in the long term otherwise the rest of the world can do more harm than good.
My question is, is the existing Plumpy’Nut infrastructure capable of being expanded to the places that need it? Can peanuts be farmed in all locations that need the product, and if not, is it possible for local production to meet the needs of other areas soon, if not now?
I guess the difference is, is the patent protecting something might maybe someday meet the need but not for a long time while other people sit around malnourished, or a fledgling growth industry that could rapidly expand throughout the continent?
BTW, I know I read somewhere that the Plumpy’Nut inventor got the idea from Nutella.
-Getting food from local farmers is desirable because it eliminates overseas transportation costs.
-Local farms produce foods just fine, but poor members of the rural population can’t afford their product because the farmers make more money selling it to urban areas.
I don’t want to hijack the debate so I will keep it short:
It’s an obvious method that any competent tech person could come up with
Automated phone order entry systems I wrote before the internet was used by the general public allowed a person to key in their customer number and order products by utilizing their previously entered shipping, billing and credit card information (not an exact example, but substantially similar). This type of problem solving is basic for any competent tech person and there are probably tens of thousands of examples of similar functionality. It simply does not rise to the level of “non-obvious”.
NTP was granted a patent on sending text data over a wireless communications network and device. The mildly confusing nature of this involves the following question:
If text data over a wireless communication network is so non-obvious and novel, why did we build wireless communication networks in the first place, to send all other types of data but e-mail?
I’m curious what the opportunity cost of producing the product in Africa is. I’m always leery of producing something domestically when it could be imported more cheaply.
Suppose the patent were invalidated and the Americans flooded the market. Could the local capacity be used for different applications that would generate surplus? Surely the Africans aren’t dependent on this particular corporation, are they?
It seems to me that there are two mostly unrelated issues here: whether it should be possible to patent vitamin-enriched peanut butter, and how best to use this innovation to combat malnutrition. The answer to the first is completely irrelevant to the second, and the answer to the second is completely irrelevant to the first.
I have no particular expertise in patent law, but it does seem just like a recipe, and I’m unaware of any precedent for patenting a really nutritious lasagna. That there’s a laundry list of conditions regarding moisture content and such is entirely unconvincing, unless there is something quite novel about the very specific combination - but given the vagueness about moisture content, that doesn’t seem terribly likely.
It does seem that the patent system is in need of an overhaul. The mere existence of the idea of defensive software patents indicates that something is very wrong indeed.
But the question of how best to utilize this recipe for peanut butter energy bars to combat malnutrition is practically unrelated. If, I suppose, unrestricted production of Plumpy’nut wout unquestionably save millions of lives and solve the problem of hunger, then patents be damned and just declare eminent domain or whatever and make the stuff. If more restricted production is actually better, then do that - not so much because of the patent, but because it’s the better course of action.
The rather odd thing here is that the patent appears to being used to counteract the effects of US (and I presume EU) ag subsidies. But that’s surely not a long term solution to the market distortions caused by those subsidies.
Look at it this way: This stuff is apparently a pretty good thing, but it’s not the be-all, end-all solution to the problem of world hunger. There are people right now who are working on other ways of addressing the problem, as well. And while doing such work is no doubt rewarding in its own way, those people working on the problem expect to get paid for their work, and rightly so. If the courts just swoop in and declare the patent on Plumpy’nut invalid because doing so will get the product to more people, what message does that send to the other folks working to end hunger? Give up hope on getting paid for it because the government will just swoop in and seize the fruits of your labor? That’s a very bad precedent to set.
As for the claim that it can’t be patented because it’s just a recipe, why in the world wouldn’t a recipe be patentable? Ultimately everything that gets patented is a recipe of some sort.
I’m all right with patents as long as they aren’t for things that are ridiculously obvious and that any idiot could have come up with. The question earlier about why nobody came up with it before? Just because nobody cared to do so, doesn’t mean that it’s not obvious.
How original is Plumpy’nut? Well, let’s look at the ingredients. They’re not the first to add vegetable oil and sugar to peanut butter. Those are standard peanut butter ingredients. Are they the first to add nutrients to powdered milk? Nope.
They’re not the first to add powdered milk to a creamy nut spread either, Nutella did that since the 1940s.
It’s basically Nutella with peanut butter instead of Hazelnut, with a ground up multivitamin. That’s it.
For a start, I’d say that a patent should only be awarded for something which is greater than the sum of its unpatentable parts. I’m not convinced that this is true for the peaNutella + multivitamin combination.
and from what plant does one get powdered milk and powdered vitamins?
Let us be real, 2 of the ingredients need to be imported from a higher tech country. Perhaps the proper recipe should all be low tech and producable from totally local materials… think a peanut and fruit version of pemmican, sort of. At least one can grow peanuts and fruits locally.
You seem to be debating yourself here. First, you say that the value of the individual parts aren’t the measure of a patent, only whether it is innovative, but then you say that this idea can’t be innovative because the individual parts aren’t impressive.
You misunderstand. I’m not saying that the individual parts aren’t impressive, I’m saying that unless the patent-holder can prove that the individual parts combine to create something more impressive than what you started with, the patent should not be awarded.
Using John Mace’s joke as an example, combining bread, peanut paste and jam to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches would not be patentable, but combining flour, yeast, and so on to make bread would be.
So…he started with peanuts and he ended up with the world’s most easily mass produced, cheap product for a particular medical purpose? That’s not impressive? Do you think that there was no skill or consideration that went in to the making of the product? That I can tell, it was formulated by a doctor for this specific task who also had knowledge of the economics of production to be able to come up with something that was ideal. It’s not his fault that it ended up tasty. If the product had ended up as something that came in a pill form but was just as easily produced and made of common materials, would you still be debating that it wasn’t innovative?
For instance, let’s say that you have a favorite brand of glue. So far as you’re aware, it’s synthetic as all hell, and yet beats the pants off all the competitors and costs half as much. Then you find out that it’s just tree sap mixed with powdered charcoal. Does that change your perception? But then if I tell you that a glue specialist 20 years ago, who happened to know a lot about the distribution of natural and renewable sources of materials and their properties came up with the idea and started a business because he knew that he could create an equal or better product than anything that required more complex production, and do so for much cheaper.
Looking back in history and saying “Well, anyone could have come up with that” simply because the ingredients are basic and the recipe simple presumes that anyone with a half a brain would know straight off the bat that charcoal and sap makes a great glue. They’re discounting that lots of other people tried to make something else that was more complex and more costly to start with. They’re discounting that you need both medical and production knowledge to come up with a cheap and easily mass produced product. There are very few people with developed knowledge of both of those. And they’re presuming that we aren’t looking at the end result of 20 years of research. For all I know, an amazing amount of effort went in to the design of this product, and it just happened to end up that their final solution, after testing hundreds of other things, was something simple.
Yes, it may have been that Plumpy’nut was something that any doctor could have pulled out of his ass, and the guy lucked in to it being something that could be mass produced. But I don’t see anyone actually questioning whether or not it was an easy process. They’re just looking at a simple recipe and assuming that simplicity is easy to find.