The hard facts of Case Plumpy’Nut have been given in Part 1 and Part 2. Now is the time to speculate. If someone wanted to be truly evil with this patent, could they start a “Kill the Children” campaign, as I have outlined in Trolling on the Human Rights?
This is clearly a patent that has the potential to be truly dangerous in the wrong hands. However, whatever bad press Nutriset has gotten, it is not causing the maximal damage that such a patent would allow.
Nor is it the only player on this field; even a very quick Google search brings up patents and applications which on the face of it don’t seem to differ that much from the Plumpy’Nut. (See for example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,…). All of these products are however slightly inferior to Plumpy’Nut in some way, so that Plumpy’Nut is optimized for famine relief.
Consider now a different scenario. Suppose Nutriset was not producing Plumpy’Nut anymore, but instead had sold the patent to a non-practicing entity X. (Non-practicing entity NPE is a polite term for “patent troll”)
Continue reading Plumpy’Nut, part 3: What could a truly evil company do?
