Not Everything Can Be Owned

This week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that genes can’t be patented. This was the best news out of Washington DC I’ve heard in a long time, because it appears to me we’re living in an era when everything is for sale.

Did you know that someone owns “The Happy Birthday Song,” that little ditty we all sing many times a year? The song is copyrighted, and if you want to include it in a movie you’re going to have to pay a fee to Warner Music Group. How do the lyrics go? “Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday dear ____, Happy birthday to you.” Wow. That’s really profound original material there!

A filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, is making a documentary about the origins of the song, and has taken Warner Music Group to court in an attempt to have the song placed in the public domain. Warner makes about $2 million a year in licensing fees—the company probably thinks every birthday party in the world should be assessed a fee to be allowed to sing the song.

The Supreme Court case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, No. 12-398, concerned whether Myriad Genetics could obtain a patent on genes the company had identified as being correlated with higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The New York Times reported:

The central question for the justices in the case was whether isolated genes are “products of nature” that may not be patented or “human-made inventions” eligible for patent protection. 

Myriad’s discovery of the precise location and sequence of the genes at issue, BRCA1 and BRCA2, did not qualify, Justice Thomas wrote. “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” he said. “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.” 

“Myriad did not create anything,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.”

So even Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia believe some things cannot be owned. This is good news indeed.

Voting Rights For All

The Supreme Court has recently heard oral arguments in a challenge to Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. I think it should be declared unconstitutional, because it does discriminate against certain areas of the country. I think the law should be changed so that every county in this country has to defend any and every change in their voting laws to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, prohibits the “denial or abridgment of the right to vote.” According to the Department of Justice website, “Among its other provisions, the Act contained special enforcement provisions targeted at those areas of the country where Congress believed the potential for discrimination to be the greatest.” Section 5 mandates that the “jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect.”

Most of these covered jurisdictions are in the South, an obvious legacy of the era of Jim Crow segregation. The covered jurisdictions include the entirety of eight southern states, plus Alaska, and a few scattered counties in North Carolina, California, Michigan, New York, and South Dakota.

In the last few years the Republican Party has blatantly tried to change voter rules to favor their candidates in state after state, many of them not within a “covered jurisdiction.” The Brennan Center for Justice, part of the New York University School of Law, has a webpage dedicated to detailing the attempts to restrict voting rights around the country. Their map shows that forty-one states introduced voter-restricting legislation since 2011, including laws requiring photo ID, shortening early voting, and making it harder to restore voting rights after a criminal conviction.

Kansas and New Hampshire now require photo IDs to vote. Wisconsin and Illinois both put new restrictions on voter registration efforts.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this effort is Pennsylvania state House leader Mike Turzai declaring on the floor of the legislature that the state’s new voter laws would deliver Pennsylvania to Mitt Romney.

But Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Illinois are not included in the Voting Rights Act’s list of suspicious areas of the country.

Clearly it’s not just one part of the country that tries to prevent “certain people” from voting. So toss Section 5 out, Supreme Court, and let’s pass a new law that requires every jurisdiction to justify changes in their voting laws.