Defenders of gene patents have billions of dollars invested in their position, and opponents tend to be ideologically opposed to the idea of commercializing genes, full stop.
Thanks to the work of the appropriately named (and blue-eyed) Danish geneticist Hans Eiberg and his colleagues, we now know that the chief mutation that causes blue eyes is a single letter change, from A to G, at the 26, 039, 213rd position on chromosome 15, within a gene called HERC2.