Mickey isn’t the only mouse trying to wriggle out of the clutches of the masters of code.
- Animation World Network

Canada last week refused to grant a patent for a genetically modified mouse.

Unlike the US, EU and Japan, Canada denies that Harvard’s scientists invented anything when they manipulated mouse genes. Its Supreme Court says the university doesn’t deserve a patent - at least not until the politicians have had a chance to think the ethics of biotech over.
- National Post

As with Mickey, business concerns slam into public concerns here.

It doesn’t make much business sense for patented genes to be freely accessible. After all, you don’t want your rivals rummaging through your research work.

This isn’t just a standard big business line. As biotech develops, smaller firms, entrepreneurial boffins often, universities even, are entering the market as niche developers. Like artists, writers, coders and other intellectual property creators, they want to safeguard their work so they can be properly rewarded.

Fine, but when it comes to biotech, sole ownership of this kind of information isn’t in the public interest. Charging for access is likely to discourage research. Ideas develop most rapidly, most fruitfully through free exchanges of information. And it goes against common sense, moral sense, for private groups to have monopolies over such fundamental knowledge.

It’s the beginning of the end of the big media monopoly, argues Robert X Cringely. The big media corporations may have succeeded in making copying illegal. But even Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that there’s been a total failure in stopping the growth of a culture of copying.

Big media’s next step will be to employ hacking techniques against peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Then, as consumer PR hits rock bottom, the corporates will introduce their own pretty peer-to-peer systems.

With corporate peer-to-peer - two incompatible ideas - likely to fail, big media will increasingly concentrate on media projects, like blockbuster films, requiring large amounts of cash. Text and music will come from individual writers and artists operating outside the old media loop.

If the corporates don’t accommodate this new media, they may find their game is over.
- Cringely’s Pulpit