The World's Fair

"Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced [on July 24th] that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue - and in some cases literally bankrupt - American farmers."

The article "MONSANTO PATENTS ASSERTED AGAINST AMERICAN FARMERS REJECTED BY PATENT OFFICE: PUBPAT Initiated Review Leads PTO to Find All Claims of All Four Patents Invalid" from the Public Patent Foundation, explains recent follow up action in defense of American farmers against Monsanto.

It all follows a September 2006 filing by PubPat. In November 2006, PUBPAT says, the USPTO agreed that the four Monsanto patents under question had not been sufficiently "patentable." In February, May, June and July 2007, all four were rejected. (See here.) The Center for Food Safety's empirical work on identifying "Monsanto's lawsuits against American farmers...thousands of investigations [and] nearly 100 lawsuits and numerous bankruptcies" helped the case. That CFS report, "Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers Report," is here.

One of the patents was " DNA construct for enhancing the efficiency of transcription," #5,164,316. Here's a *.pdf of the whole thing.

The second patent was also a DNA construct for enhancing the efficiency of transcription -- I see it has five claims, instead of the four from the first patent, but you'll have to read the fine print to see the full difference from that prior one (Dave could parse these pretty easily, when he gets back from Nigeria). It's #5,196,525.

The third is, you guessed it, and as is common, almost indistinguishable from the first two: #5,322,938. Oh sorry, that's not true. Although titled " DNA sequence for enhancing the efficiency of transcription," this one is about chimeric transcriptional initiation, not a DNA construct. How silly of me.

And here's the fourth revoked patent: #5,352,605. It had 19 claims, and those were about chimeric transcription too. Plus an intermediate plasmid. It was called " Chimeric genes for transforming plant cells using viral promoters."

So we have it.