{"id":188549,"date":"2010-09-05T21:34:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-06T02:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/09\/05\/so-now-you-can-patent-recipes\/"},"modified":"2010-09-05T21:34:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-06T02:34:00","slug":"so-now-you-can-patent-recipes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/09\/05\/so-now-you-can-patent-recipes\/","title":{"rendered":"So Now You Can Patent Recipes"},"content":{"rendered":"

It appears that a French company has patented Plumpy’nut<\/a>, a fortified peanut butter as a treatment for severe malnutrition:<\/p>\n

Should a revolutionary humanitarian food product be protected by commercial patent, when lifting restrictions might save millions of starving children?<\/p>\n

That is the moral conundrum at the heart of a bitter transatlantic legal dispute.<\/p>\n

On one side are the French inventors of Plumpy’nut, a peanut paste which in the last five years has transformed treatment of acute malnutrition in Africa.<\/p>\n

Nutriset, the Normandy-based company, says the patent is needed to safeguard production of Plumpy’nut in the developing world, and to stop the market being swamped by cheap US surpluses.<\/p>\n

And on the other side are two American not-for-profit organisations that have filed a suit at a Washington DC federal court to have the patent overturned.<\/p>\n

They say they are being stopped by Nutriset from manufacturing similar – and cheaper – peanut-based food products, despite the proven demand from aid agencies.<\/p>\n

“By their actions, Nutriset are preventing malnourished children from getting what they need to survive. It is as simple as that,” said Mike Mellace, of the San Diego-based Mama Cares Foundation. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I will spare you the picture of the severely malnourished child in the article, but it appears to me that this patent is not only morally indefensible, but also a very real expansion of IP law to an area where it had not previously applied, recipes, which are rather famously not<\/span> covered by copyright (see here<\/a>), and the patent appears to be rather broad, covering pretty much every nut based food with milk in it<\/a>, which would include the Nutella from which Plumpy’nut was originally derived.<\/p>\n

The problem here is that the other potential players in this market (EVIL term, that) are all small not for profits who would be driven to extinction with a loss in a patent court.<\/p>\n

One solution here is to make patents like civil rights law, and allow people to file suit before infringing, for the same reason that they do with civil rights suits: because the chilling effect occurs even if no one breaks the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that a French company has patented Plumpy’nut, a fortified peanut butter as a treatment for severe malnutrition: Should a revolutionary humanitarian food product be protected by commercial patent, when lifting restrictions might save millions of starving children? That is the moral conundrum at the heart of a bitter transatlantic legal dispute. On one …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,1090,969,1109,1191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-ethics","category-evil","category-ip","category-patent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}