Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property 449
An anonymous reader writes "Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was fired by the World Bank blasted drug patents in an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled 'Scrooge and intellectual property rights.' 'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous.'"
Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes? (Score:2, Interesting)
>You can patent anything if your government is stupid enough to pass the laws.
If people allow their government to do the cowardly thing and obey US laws, even though they are not actually subject to them, maybe they deserve to die.
The argument for patents.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Alternatives to Intellectual Property (Score:5, Interesting)
Medical Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
Apparently he was also a Girl Scout at some point...
The entire medical industry is broken. Probably to the point where it cannot be fixed. Government regulation could go a long way, but who really wants a bigger government?
1. Stop advertising drugs on TV and in magazines. You are not a doctor. You shouldn't be "asking your doc" if zotramiphil is right for your itchy ass.
2. Stop developing drugs for stupid shit. Yes, lots of people have Type2 diabetes. We already have a cure for that; a treadmill. Stop wasting money to develop a drug *just* to make money off a stupid disease.
2a. Why can an old guy take a drug to make his dick hard when I can't smoke a joint?
3. If a company develops a truly amazing cure/drug, the government should step in and buy it for the cost of development. The drug should them be distributed for the cost of production inside the US and for twice the cost of production outside the US. Once the costs are recouped, it should be just the cost of production inside and outside the US.
4. Get rid of medical lawsuits. A judge and jury have no idea if what a doc did was right or wrong. Appoint a commission of well-respected docs and have all medical complaints go through that office. If the commission decides the doc was wrong, then the doc should be fired and the patient recouped in a fair way.
4a. Make hospitals stop charging so much. Why does it cost $200 for an x-ray and $10 for a tylenol? Because of lawsuits.
5. Make US employers provide health insurance. Yes, all of them. Call it the cost of doing business in the USA.
5a. For every non-US employee a company contracts or subcontracts, make them pay money directly to the federal government's unemployment fund. In other words, a non-US employee working for a US company still gets taxed at the same rate as a US employee would.
6. Identify the hypochondriacs and truly sick people. Fix them. I go to the doc, on average, once a year for a checkup. Maybe once every 3 years for an illness. My kids get checkups and rarely go to the ER for being sick or hurt. If you or your family member is going to the hospital every week, something (lifestyle or mental) needs to be fixed.
7. Pay for any improvements by taking money out of the DoD. Stipulate that the DoD has to maintain current manning levels and quality of life. All money taken from their budget should be from cruft (how much does DoD spend on office supplies) or from special projects (Do we really need the JSF right after the F-22).
7a. Reduce the funding to every government agency by 2% per year until the customers start complaining. Then, analyze the complaints to see if better customer service could fix the problem. Fire assholes and slashdoters. We pay for 8 hours, fucking work them.
8. Threaten corporate shareholders with jail for withholding good drugs at low cost.
9. Mandate one special project for major companies. Wanna do business? Then you have to work on a cure for AIDS.
Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes? (Score:2, Interesting)
In the US, you can patent anything, apparently. Not only that, but I sure as hell am willing to bet the owner of the material that was used to "find" the genes in question or his/her family hasn't received a penny's worth of royalties...No, they got their $50 for participating in the study. Thank you, bye bye.
Some thoughts about patents (Score:5, Interesting)
1. If a researcher looses a monopoly on one patent, but in turn gains access to 10 million other patents - then that is a net gain for invention and for business, not a net loss. The facts bear that out. For example, how most the new drug innovation was happening in India where they don't have patents on drugs, or the less proprietary x86 architecture that took the market by storm in spite of it's design flaws.
2. Patents do not change the demand for invention and R&D, they only distort the market and cause it to center around invention controls instead of invention related services. Well, large companies, lawyers, and government are good at controlling things. Inventors are good at inventing things, so patents do really not help inventors or small lean innovators.
3. To control inventions requires physical coercion and violence, and patents are very violent. Like how they arguably held back safety devices in cars for 20 years while millions died needlessly, and like how attempts of patent enforcement in Africa have likely led to over a million unneeded AIDS related deaths. Also, DDT was banned within months of its patent running out, freon too, to make room for bigger markets. But at least the freon one can't be attributed to 50 million malaria deaths.
4. In the future, technology is likely to bring production back into the home thru 3d printers and nanotechnology. IMHO, patents will require more violence and more government micro-regulation than ever in order to be secured.
5. A side effect of the patent system is that researchers who share research and innovation between companies are punished. It creates a strong disincentive against collaboration. It forces innovators to spend orders of magnitude more on R&D and causes them and their research to be micromanaged. So patents drive up the cost of R&D by orders of magnitude, drive down quality, and then now they say "well, we need patent monopolies to recover all these costs".
6. People tend to think that having all these incompatible parts and all these incompatible interfaces on every single car, cell phone, and consumer product - is just a normal part of a free market economy. I speculate that it is not, and that patents encourage these distortions in addition to all the waste and unneeded obsolescence that goes with it.
7. People tend to think that having expensive pharmaceuticals with all sorts of strange chemical side effects is just a normal part of a free market economy. In addition they think that the shunning natural cures, herbs, and vitamins is a normal function of modern medicine and science. I speculate that it also is not, but another distortion caused by patents.
8. Patents are not property anymore than slaves on the plantation are. Just cause someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is.
In sum, patents don't help inventors, but distort markets to work against them and even punish and isolate them. They are violent, genocidal, coercive, unproductive, inefficient, and drive down profit, quality, and compatibility across markets everywhere. The future for patents does not look promising, but rather to be one of millions of US elderly suffering from high costs and strange chemichal side effects on their medication, and one of a military police state required to enforce them as things like 3d printing and nanotechnology force the commoditization of invention.
Re:Medical Industry (Score:3, Interesting)
Combine 5 & 6: everyone is covered but everyone must get regular checkups. Hypochondriacs are mental cases and should be treated as such.
#5a; If you work in the USA you pay the same taxes regardless of being a citizen, H1-B, or green card holder. Yea, in some cases crooked firms who knowingly hire illegals as employees or contractors (Wal-Mart) don't withhold taxes. I would say no taxes paid no access to health care or the legal system.
#7 Thats a dumb idea. The cost of the military "quality of life" goes up every year just due to inflation. Big ticket projects and R&D should be funded but we need to make sure we get the return. We can't weaken defense to the point we are vulnerable if some idiot in Iran or North Korea wants to attack our way of life. In your case the JSF is a fighter for AF and Navy and Marines, the F-22 is AF only. In this case we DID save money by each service NOT getting to run it's own program.
#7a I'll support that one, if due to lower staff they don't get to make up and enforce stupid laws that add to the cost of items.
#8 is just silly. I own shares of a Drug company via my 401K Mutual Funds..so how does that make me a criminal? Profit maxmization within the ethical bounds of the community is what business SHOULD do. They make money, they pay taxes, and dividends to investors large and small. What I would support is less years of patent protection AND there should be a way for the Gov't to "buy out" a drug for the public good in times of a health care crisis.
#9 is starting down an interesting path. I'd say if a drug company spends $1 of Gov't money on researching a drug then that drug patent belongs to the Gov't and it's citizens. The Defense Department should do that too. I know the laws are on the books to do that for DoD work but they are rarely enforced.
Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes? (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll never see a patent claim written for "an anomaly." No one wants to patent a gene that causes a disease - regardless of whether the anomaly is naturally or artificially induced.
What you will see are patent claims for new inventions that rely on the discovery of such an anomaly and its effects. Depending on what the anomaly does and how you want to treat it, here are some sample claims for such inventions:
Similarly, no one can patent "turmeric." Last I checked, "turmeric" isn't novel, as any Durkee's spice catalog from the 1960's or so will indicate. But a company might discover that turmeric has a previously unknown therapeutic property, and may patent the use of turmeric for that purpose.
Sorry, folks - the patent system is rarely as insane as extremists make it out to be.
- David Stein
Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, that could be because everyone that had anything to do with that aspect of the government at that time was a former Monsanto or former Monsanto subsidiary executive (for instance, John Asscroft, former Attorney General).
When you "own" the government, in time you own everything else, too.
The Gates Foundation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:eminent domain (Score:4, Interesting)
Throw into the mix all the money the drug companies have given to politicians [opensecrets.org] to help maintain the status quo and you begin to see how difficult it is to make changes.
Re:Alternatives to Intellectual Property (Score:3, Interesting)
Let the free market decide.
We need a large-scale system where either a buyer or a creator could publicly propose a "prize" for any new creation of their specification. Interested buyers could put whatever it was personally worth to them into an escrow account and interested creators could bid for a contract on that escrowed money. When they come to an agreement and there is enough money in escrow, the creator gets busy creating.
Such a system need not even be limited to finished products - it could be done iteratively. Because the end result of each "prize" is put into the public domain, each iteration need not necessarily even employ the same creators as the last one.
The key is for the system to be large-scale. Large enough for everyone with a computer and a bank account to participate. It can bankrupt a drug company if it spends $10B on developing a drug that doesn't pan out. But when 1 billion people spend $10 each and it doesn't work out, its not much worse than skipping dinner. And you get the benefit of all that $10B worth of work now in the public domain some of it might be salvageable for some other use, instead of being locked away in some company's vault of "intellectual property" that no one looks at and no one can use.
Re:The argument for patents.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes? (Score:2, Interesting)
The whole reason you're free to speak out against your government and corporations it that your whining doesn't matter to anyone but you.
When the Chinese rulers eventually cotton on, the yanks will have one less thing to be smug about.
Murderous Monsanto (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Patented Breast Cancer Genes? (Score:3, Interesting)
The most important question is whether it would be worth it for any company, even a large one, to take the risk of patent litigation or infringement in order to find out. Most likely the actual test is very cheap and therefore wouldn't yield a large return on investment. It's safer for all the other companies to pay the patent extortion and pass the cost on to all of us. Even if you don't get this test, your health insurance rates are higher to pay for other people's tests.
Re:can this be true? (Score:2, Interesting)
Pharmaceutical companies are parasites (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speaking Out (Score:3, Interesting)
These mechanisms are favored by the minority upper class whites, because these mechanisms perpetuate their dominance on political and economic power in this nation. Yeah, people like my parents. People like my neighbors. Sometimes, even I am afraid of what could happen in this nation under true Democracy.
It's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable path. I don't think that, even given the recent turnover in elections, that any real change is going to happen. We're stuck in that catch-22 - that limiting campaign money is philosophically equivalent to limiting speech. And we're pretty fond of the IDEA of free speech (even if there are people who are willing to sacrifice it for a feeling of security). This contradictory approach is driving a lot of the ire and conflict in our political process, and it is escalating more and more with each election cycle. Everybody feels it. Everyone senses that it's wrong that individual citizens have no voice, in comparison to the mass media. Everyone is pissed about it. Yet, every time we get mad at the incumbents and toss them out on their asses, the folks that come in to replace them are still interested in preserving the status quo. I don't really know what's going to happen when Congress opens next week under Democratic power. I tend to be pessimistic. I tend to think that power corrupts - and the machinery of government that the Democrats have taken control of, will corrupt them too. And next election cycle, an angry electorate will throw them out and put the Republicans back in power - wash, rinse, repeat. But with each cycle, the dissatisfaction and anger builds. And the lies aren't holding fast anymore. And the people have the Internet, to call out these lies and expose them. The Internet could be the catalyst for some real change in the USA. But I don't see it happening for at least two more cycles. We're not angry enough to leave our jobs, march in the streets, get tear-gassed (or worse). Not yet.
and it is by far the stupidest nation in the Western Hemisphere
I don't know about that. If you know the history of some of these South American countries (in particular, Argentina), and how they seem to, over and over, elect the fascist dictators (I'm thinking specifically of Peron, and Pinochet - and I haven't really made up my mind about Chavez); the USA isn't quite that far gone yet.
Personally, I think it all went wrong when we let Reagan deregulate the newsmedia industry, which allowed too much consolidation, and gave a few ultra-wealthy industrialists almost complete control of all the information we get. Cable TV was poised to break the monopoly of the three major TV news networks - and that was nipped in the bud. They've been trying to nip the internet in the bud too. But I think they were too late.