Supreme Court Unanimous: Human GenesCannot Be Patented

AP via TPM has a few details.

Notwithstanding lower court decisions to the contrary, this is the only result that makes sense. The human genome is as old as H. sapiens, which is several hundreds of thousands of years old by most reasonable scientific estimates. Therefore, neither Myriad Genetics Inc. nor any other business entity or individual can claim to have invented the two genes related to breast cancer, only to have isolated and identified them.

That's a relief. I am glad to know I once again own my genes, or at least that no one else owns them. And to think I thought it was bad when someone in the 19^th century managed to patent the telegraph magnet...

Thanks to the Supreme Court, in the picture above,
only the electrical components can be patented

US Entertainment Industry Cannot Resist Threatening Us With Un‑American Things

Specifically, please read Boing Boing's post, US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to attack pirates! (Exclamation is part of original title.)

I hardly need to repeat myself to regular readers: the entertainment industry is attempting to use technology to enforce a vision of intellectual property directly contradictory to that of our nation's founders, who saw copyright and patent not only as expressions of current benefit for creators of IP, but also as future impetus to create new IP based on existing IP... replacing that with a vision of total ownership and control of transmission media and equipment forever.

How far must we go to end this? Already, after the rootkit a couple years ago, I no longer purchase Sony CDs or insert those I already own in my CD-ROM drive. Shall I stop purchasing movie DVDs and audio CDs? I will do just that if RIAA and MPAA continue to push the boundaries of total ownership. They can goddamn well go to hell without absorbing any more of my money if they insist on treating their customer base that way... already I haven't bought a CD or DVD for myself in several years. And no, I don't fucking steal their products either.

(H/T ellroon.)

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(Oh, come fucking on... "movie" is not in Firefox's default spelling checker dictionary! Oh, wait, now I see: for the second time this week, Mozilla has forced a change from my manually entered en_US to en_GB. Do they really want me to switch once and for all to Google Chrome? That's where I'm headed if this nonsense doesn't stop...)