“Human beings” as excluded subject matter for the purposes of the Patents Act 1990 (Cth)
Charles Lawson
What the paper says
The purpose of this article is to review the meaning of "human beings" as it is used in the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) . The analysis demonstrates that the meaning remains uncertain and that appeals to essential characters and taxonomic conceptions of "human beings" are not satisfactory. The article concludes that the existing qualitative test of what constitutes "essentially human characteristics" (that is not defeated by any technological means of how the "human being" is constituted or created), and the "unlikely to be ephemeral" standard in applying the "contrary to law" exclusion for post-patent grant exploitation limitations, are problematic.
1 citation
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.20 × 0.4 = 0.08 |
| M · momentum | 0.20 × 0.15 = 0.03 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.