to eliminate competition from less-expensive aftermarket ink cartridges that “hacked” the digital lock on Lexmark’s printer. It took many months and many more thousands of dollars to convince
courts that these competing products weren’t illicit materials. Only in America, you might think, but draconian DMCA-like laws are spreading around the globe like digital wildfire. In 2004 thirty-three-year-old Isamu Kaneko, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo, was arrested because he developed file-sharing software similar to the popular KaZaA application. The same year, the Italian parliament passed a law imposing jail time of up to three years for anyone caught sharing copyrighted material via the Internet.
These sanctions are another unfortunate outcome in the drive
to privatize every imaginable thing in the world, including genetic material. The peculiar case of John Moore couldn’t have happened without the expansion of patent law in the past quarter century.
When Moore’s spleen was removed to treat a rare form of leukemia, his University of California doctor patented a cell line taken from his organ, without Moore’s knowledge or permission. The long-term market value of the patent has been estimated at roughly $3 billion, and Moore’s doctor received $3 million in stocks from Genetics Institute, the firm that marketed and developed a drug based on the patent.2
When Moore found out about these shenanigans, he sued—and
lost. The California Supreme Court claimed that giving Moore any rights would lead to the commodification of the human body—
an argument that ruffled the feathers of Judge J. Broussard, who dissented from the Moore v. Regents of the University of California decision. “Far from elevating these biological materials above the marketplace,” Broussard wrote, “the majority’s holding simply bars plaintiff, the source of the cells, from obtaining the benefit of the McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:28 AM Page 6
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cells’ value, but permits the defendants, who allegedly obtained the cells from plaintiff by improper means, to retain and exploit the full economic value of their ill-gotten gains.”
Patents not only allow companies to have a monopoly control
over human and plant genes, but also business methods, such as Amazon’s “one-click” procedure. U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411 gives Amazon the right to extract money from any business that wants to let customers purchase items on the Internet with only one click of the mouse. The online retailer exercises the monopoly right that this patent gives it, bullying small and large companies into purchasing a license for this “technology.” For instance, Amazon won a court order that prevented barnesandnoble.com from using this feature for two holiday-shopping seasons before the two parties reached a settlement. Today, every company from Apple’s iTunes to the smallest of businesses that Amazon’s lawyers can shake down are compelled to license the “one-click” feature. Otherwise, they’ll be sued.
Clear Channel Communications, which controls more than one
hundred live venues and over thirteen hundred radio stations in the United States, bought what is considered in the music industry to be an important patent. It covers selling recordings of concerts immediately after a performance, something that has recently become popular with fans who want to take home live CDs. Other companies had been providing this service, but Clear Channel intends to enforce its patent to squeeze licensing fees from other small businesses and bands and to eliminate competition in this area of commerce. “It’s one more step toward massive control and consolidation of Clear Channel’s corporate agenda,” says Mike Luba, the manager of the jam band String Cheese Incident, which was prevented by the corporate Goliath from using CD-burning equip-
ment. Pixies manager Ken Goes grumbled, “I’m not fond of doing business with my arm twisted behind my back.”3
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