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any other patents that have been granted and have not yet expired. The
'price' an applicant pays for a patent is the detailed disclosure of its content,
meaning that others are free to understand the invention, if not to mimic it
(at least until the patent period ends). Rejected patent claims can be pursued
on appeal in all advanced and most developing capitalist countries. As we'll
now see, biotechnology firms have been filing patent claims by working
with, even as they seek to reposition, the distinction between 'natural biol-
ogy' and 'biological inventions'. Their acts of semantic apartheid and border
relocation stand to have major economic and sociocultural implications.
BOX 5.2
INTELLECTUAL PATENTS AS REPRESENTATIONS
Patents can be understood as textual and graphic representations. It was
not always thus. Prior to the eighteenth century, many patent claims in
Western countries and principalities were presented in a physical form
to a representative of a sovereign. A verbal description and explanation,
along with a practical demonstration, of a new device by its inven-
tor was common. If a patent was granted, it was typically recorded
in writing, but this written document did not comprise a detailed
textual record of the patented invention. This changed with the intel-
lectual property laws that came into being during the early decades of
democratic, post-feudal, capitalist states like the United States (which
passed a Patent Act in 1790). As Mario Biagioli argues in his history of
patent law, such acts 'recast the [physical] . . . invention (which had
previously been the sole instantiation of the invention) as just one
ofthepossible...embodiments of . . . an idea. This was not a pro-
cess of abstraction from the particular to the general, but rather one
of separation between form and matter' (Biagioli, 2006: 1143). Modern
patents are written and graphical representations of a process, design or
artefact, not the process, design or artefact in itself. Over the decades,
patent claims have become ever more detailed and precise. They 'repre-
sent' in both senses discussed in Chapter 2. Not only do they comprise
an epistemic rendering of the ontological existents referred to, they
also represent the achievements and commercial interests of the inven-
tor(s). Thus, patents both 'stand for' and 'stand in for' simultaneously.
Patents would be meaningless if they were not understood to be prox-
ies for other things (i.e. inventions and their creators). To complicate
matters further, patent officials act as representatives when assessing
all patent claims. On the one hand, they are expected to uphold the
public interest. Things that are either freely available or readily under-
standable, like oxygen or good manners, cannot be subject to patent
claims because it would permit the privatisation of things that are
 
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