A couple of months ago, some of the beer personalities I follow on Facebook shared and urged to sign this petition against Patents on Beer and Barley . The text raised a couple red flags that made me doubt the claims of the initiators the petition and prompted me to look further. The first that thing bothered me was the use of “greedy corporations” to describe Heineken and Carlsberg (H&C), the owners of the patents. Regardless of what you or I may think about these companies and other large corporations, I’ve come to associate this language with people who will not appeal to rational and fact-based arguments to get the public on their side, but to our emotions and natural confirmation bias. That wouldn’t have been such a problem, if the whole text of the petition wasn’t so disingenuous. They say: Barley, brewing and beer are all old and well known traditions, which anybody can use. Nevertheless the European Patent Office (EPO) has granted patents to Heineken and Carlsberg for r
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