Why You Can’t Patent Yourself (Or Others)
Now, the yesterday-mentioned issue can’t be resolved merely by the patent office saying “okay, we’ll just ban those types of inventions”. They have to offer a specific legal rationale for their decision. A Boston Globe article sketches out some interesting potential legal grounds for denying patents on part-human inventions.
The first two are geared toward patenting others:
1. It would violate constitutional rights to privacy.
“If a patent were to be issued on a human, it would conflict with one of the core privacy rights in the Constitution– a person’s right to decide whether and when to procreate.”
2. It would violate the 13th amendment.
If you patent something, you have the right to exclude other people from “using” your invention. If you have a patent on another person, that might be considered slavery, because they could not be employed (”used”) by anyone else without your permission.
But the third one, and my favorite, also explains why you can’t patent yourself:
3. Traveling would violate trade restrictions.
If a person goes overseas for a surgical operation that has been patent- protected in the US but not the country where he receives the operation, then gets patented in that country as a “surgically altered human”, when he travels back to the US, that would count as illegal importation of a product made abroad with processes patented in the US.
In other words, he’d have committed patent infringement by “illegally importing himself”.
[…] nt Having already looked at the question of why people can’t patent themselves, it’s time to bra […]
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