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TheodoreSmith-FirstPaper 8 - 30 Oct 2008 - Main.TheodoreSmith
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THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS | | | Chemical compounds are protected under US patent law as "compositions of matter." A successful compound patent will provide the inventor with exclusive rights to all uses of that composition (including research) over the life of the patent. Although an inventor seeking a compound patent must show a use for the claimed composition, the same patent may ordinarily be defeated by prior art showing only the structure of the molecule and "enablement", a means of successfully building or synthesizing the chemical; no showing of usefulness is required. As advances in the material sciences refine techniques for the atomic level manipulation of matter, we are rapidly nearing the point where enablement of a given organic compound becomes trivial; any organic molecule may be constructed from its constituent atoms or pre-synthesized building blocks. | |
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< | Once this threshold is reached, new organic chemical compounds will become far easier to push into the public domain. Even if such novel compositions are not ruled to be generally unpatentable under the doctrine of obviousness, they will be vulnerable to being placed into the public domain by any individual publishing a sufficiently detailed map of the molecules structure and a simple set of instructions enabling construction of the molecule. The low cost of publishing over the internet paired with the plausibility of algorithmic methods of generating molecular permutations and enablement steps almost guarantee the eventual construction of a database of molecular permutations. This database, showing structure and enablement steps for a wide swath of potential organic compounds, would have the effect of rendering unpatentable every compound appearing within. | >
> | Once this threshold is reached, new organic chemical compounds will become far easier to push into the public domain. Even if such novel compositions are not ruled to be generally unpatentable under the doctrine of obviousness, they will be vulnerable to being placed into the public domain by any individual publishing a sufficiently detailed map of the molecules structure and a simple set of instructions enabling construction of the molecule. The low cost of publishing over the internet paired with the plausibility of algorithmic methods of generating molecular permutations and enablement steps almost guarantee the eventual construction of a wiki-style database of molecular permutations. This database, showing structure and enablement steps for a wide swath of potential organic compounds, would have the effect of rendering unpatentable every compound appearing within. | | |
Enablement and Scanning Electron Microscopes | | | Legal Ramifications of Trivial Enablement | |
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< | Legally, the trivialization of the enablement step could | >
> | Legally, the trivialization of the enablement of molecular compounds is likely to cause the most disruption within the patent doctrines of obviousness and novelty.
Of these two doctrines, obviousness is the least likely to be disruptive to the patentability of molecular compounds. Although it could be argued that the combination of trivial enablement and computationally accessible discrete structures make nearly any chemical compound "obvious ... to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains," and therefore unpatentable, it is unlikely, given the history and economic importance of these patents, that either the Patent Office or the Federal Courts would accept such arguments. | | | Once techniques for systematically fabricating chemical compounds enter the scientific mainstream, the enablement of any sufficiently well described molecule becomes trivial (or at least may be rendered trivial by the development of a computer algorithm capable of generating enablement steps from chemical diagrams). Once this point is reached, any novel compound could be placed in the public domain simply through public online publication of its chemical structure and build routine; an extensive database of permutations of chemical forms would provide a legal basis on which to invalidate new compound patents. |
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