At Last . . . Two Important Legal Victories!
In the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations, it's nice to know that sometimes we can at least rely on the courts to do the right thing in protecting fundamental human rights and dignity.
In the decision that's getting all the attention, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that companies cannot patent naturally occurring human genes. I was amused when a lawyer for Myriad Genetics was interviewed on NPR this morning. He rambled nonstop for over ten minutes, wouldn't let the host get a word in, and never actually said anything. The host finally thanked him for his time and ended the "interview" without giving him a chance to respond.
The Myriad lawyer never did answer the one question he was asked: Why would corporations have the arrogance to believe they can patent things that are natural and found in every human cell? In fact, I have yet to hear or read any coherent answer to that question that doesn't get bogged down in self-contradiction, logical inconsistencies, and corporate double-talk.
Myriad seems to be trying to spin this as a victory by saying that some of its patents were upheld -- the ones for things they actually invented -- while totally ignoring the patents that were struck down. This of course misses the point. I don't think anyone was taking issue with patenting something synthetic that was invented in a lab. The issue was patenting genes that occur in nature. And it's not a numbers game about how many patents were upheld versus how many were struck down. In short, Myriad is doing nothing but blowing smoke to confuse the issue.
Perhaps most amusing is that Myriad also seems to be blaming the Court, saying that the justices apparently just don't understand the "inventive process". Again, Myriad, you miss the obvious point: Unless you happened to have God on the payroll, there was no inventive process. And if they did have God on the payroll, well . . . I think there may be some deeper cosmological issues here than a simple patent case.
In an equally important decision, a federal judge in New York struck an important blow against the insidious practice of employers re-classifying entry-level work as "internships" to avoid paying wages. The hope is that in the wake of this decision in federal court, employers will start rethinking their hiring practices, because unpaid internships will simply become too legally risky.
Let's consider the economic situation for average people, especially average younger people. The unemployment rate for 20-somethings is sky high. Many people in their 20's and 30's are buried under mountains of student loan debt. Real wages have been stagnant or steadily declining for decades. And for the first time in U.S. history, there is a younger generation that's not expected to do better than their parents. Meanwhile, there's companies making millions from skilled labor that they're not paying for.
It would also help if the federal government and the states would place a greater priority on enforcing the law. There are already very strict federal and state guidelines in place to prevent this sort of employer abuse of unpaid internships, including requirements that any unpaid internship must be for the benefit of the intern, that the employer derives no value from the labor of the intern, and that interns cannot displace paid employees.