Patent Law

Cool It

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

In an echo of denouncing "irrational exuberance," the organization best known for harboring practicing pederasts has denounced vigorous patent protection. The dope with the hanging rope is none other than the Pope, who put out the hard word.

"On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."

Bishops and priests on down the line twittered at the phrase "unduly rigid assertion." The jig is up. Time to rub the excessive off the zeal so as to give the Pope something less to squeal. About. And don't forget to tithe.

Pope Benedict XVI slapped his big Benedict on a letter entitled "On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth," which spills ample ink on "love in truth" as "a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized." The lofty sentiments are ultimately self-serving, and follow the traditional church doctrine of being logical non-sequiturs, because, once past the craven need to fill the spiritual emptiness inside, the whole Catholic house of cards doesn't make much sense.

In Populorum Progressio, Paul VI taught that progress, in its origin and essence, is first and foremost a vocation: "in the design of God, every man is called upon to develop and fulfil himself, for every life is a vocation." This is what gives legitimacy to the Church's involvement in the whole question of development.

The dig on IP is part of more general thrust relating to equality, under the theme "a modern economy respectful of the rights of the weakest." Because poor folk are big suckers for religion.

22. Today the picture of development has many overlapping layers. The actors and the causes in both underdevelopment and development are manifold, the faults and the merits are differentiated. This fact should prompt us to liberate ourselves from ideologies, which often oversimplify reality in artificial ways, and it should lead us to examine objectively the full human dimension of the problems. As John Paul II has already observed, the demarcation line between rich and poor countries is no longer as clear as it was at the time of Populorum Progressio. The world's wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging. In poorer areas some groups enjoy a sort of "superdevelopment" of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation. "The scandal of glaring inequalities" continues. Corruption and illegality are unfortunately evident in the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries, both old and new, as well as in poor ones. Among those who sometimes fail to respect the human rights of workers are large multinational companies as well as local producers. International aid has often been diverted from its proper ends, through irresponsible actions both within the chain of donors and within that of the beneficiaries. Similarly, in the context of immaterial or cultural causes of development and underdevelopment, we find these same patterns of responsibility reproduced. On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care. At the same time, in some poor countries, cultural models and social norms of behaviour persist which hinder the process of development.

Background from Knowledge Ecology Notes. In an ecclesiastical truth-or-dare, Professor Dennis Crouch put me up to this. Thanks Dennis. Hey, how come your blog entry didn't have a pope photo? Christ, man, show some respect.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on July 09, 2009 (boomark / email).