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Jan 11 2009
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2 reviews
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books
• thepublicdomain.org
From Ch1 of the book: Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a "Sealed Crustless Sandwich." In the curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described this way:
A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.
"But why does this upset you?" I asked; "you've seen much worse than this." And he had. There are patents on human genes, on auctions, on algorithms ... With all of this going on, this enclosure movement of the mind, this locking up of symbols and themes and facts and genes and ideas (and eventually people), why get excited about the patenting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? "I just thought that there were limits," he said; "some things should be sacred."
