The Myth of Patent Neutrality: Property, Patents, Animal Rights and Animal Welfare in Commissioner of Patents V. President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Commissioner of Patents v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court of Canada held that higher life forms such as an oncomouse are not patentable in Canada. Although disagreeing on the issue of patentability, the majority and dissenting judgments were consistent to the extent that both rejected ethical arguments concerning the legitimacy of granting patents in higher life forms; both took the view that, given the ostensible ethical neutrality of the patent regime, such arguments are misplaced. Ethical concerns arise not as part of the patenting process, but during upstream research and development and downstream commercial exploitation. The objective of this analysis is to take exception to the reasoning in both the majority and dissenting judgments concerning patent neutrality. Using the examples of animal rights and animal welfare, two controversial ethical issues raised in the decision, this analysis will demonstrate that the patent system is not ethical neutral in relation to the interests of non-human animals who are made to be the objects of intellectual property rights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.090 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.043 | 0.032 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".