Violating A Patent As Moral Choice 967
kuzmich writes "The Taiwanese government has announced that it will violate patent laws to manufacture a drug that can help fight bird flu virus. In doing so, they have spelled out their reasoning very clearly: 'We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche, it means we have shown our goodwill to Roche and we appreciate their patent. But to protect our people is the utmost important thing'. Not being in Taiwan, this makes me wonder how bad the situation would have to be for some of the other governments to follow a path of violating patent and copyright laws for the benefit of the general population. Are there precedents, procedures for doing so?"
Not right! (Score:5, Funny)
Just kidding, of course. Good for Taiwan. Patent laws should not cause the death of people.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tiwan is acting in the face of a pandemic. What about less widespread, but equally fatal diseases? For example, why isn't it equally ethical for a country to ignore patent laws for cancer drugs? Why hasn't this already been done for AIDS drugs?
I'm all for this, by the way. I hope this emboldens other countries to do the right thing for its citizens.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=545
Re:Not right! (Score:4, Informative)
In a free market capitalist economy competition is what drives improvement. The ability to develop and produce more, cheaper. Kill competition by granting monopolies and you dont get more development, you get less. Take away competetive pressure and companies grow fat and inefficient, just like state-run monopolies. The inefficiencies drive costs and lead to massive wasted resources. Remember, not even 20% of the income of the pharmcorps is spent on R&D. They spend twice what they spend on R&D on marketing and administration.
The unfortunate economics of monopolies means that it will only get worse; pricing in monopoly fields isnt driven by competition, it's driven by available capital and the cost at which people will do without instead. The more money available in the insurance systems, the more money the pharmcorps will charge. And promptly spend on marketing, convincing doctors to prescribe patented headache pills, instead of generics.
"in turn we will sacrafice the insentive"
A monopoly is an extremely inappropriate incentive in a free market, and the likelyhood is it does more damage than good. A vast amount of the medical research is already funded by various states, and something along the lines of granting per-use payments, government contracting for development or tax breaks for patents would be far more in line with other extra incentives in the free market.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Insightful)
State monopolies are not about efficiency my good sir, they're about high-quality service and providing said service to everyone, even when it's completely inefficient to provide said service.
State monopolies are about making service available to the most people with the best QoS, they're about reaching 100% or as close as possible, not about reaching the 20% that lead to viable service economically and leaving 80% in the dust because you consider it costs too much to provide them said service.
State monopolies are about long-term vision, 10+ years when not 50+ years, when most private structures' "long term" is barely 5 years.
This is why most european rail service actually work at the moment even if they don't bring in much money, while UK rail service blows and is overpriced.
Now I don't mean that govt/state monopolies shouldn't try to be efficient, it's in fact one of their duties as users of public tax money, they owe it to the whole population of the country (said population more or less being their shareholders), but it's not and should never be their first goals. The first and most important goals of state monopolies should always be quality and reach.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
The issue here is complicated because of trade deals the US and other nations have set up. Essentially these deals set the USA up to pay for the research and development costs for drugs for the world. In return the US would bill its consumers very high rates for drugs in order to finance this and provide the "poor" nations of the world with "cheap" drugs. This funky set of deals set up the USA to fleese its sick and elderly as a secret way to assist the "poor" nations populations who by the theory could not afford to finance their own medicine.
The deals worked for a short time until the "poor" nations started generic production. This bloomed a "cheap" drug market for the world leaving US consumers paying 10 to 20 times the price paid by others in the world. The Big Pharma guys who were going to provide US workers with jobs under this scam promptly went of shore this is why the developments and owners are multinationals. This has shattered the underpenning of Social Security in the USA. It has also left drug development nearly 100% funded by the US Government under contract fictions that appear private or they would violate the trade deals. This is because the trade deals left the US with a "drug monopoly." Of course it is falling apart.
With all of this corporate and government con game going on, there is no Pandemic. It too is a fiction. Bird Flu is indegenous to the Americas. It in no way fits the profile of a "Pandemic." It is too lethal to be a viable pathogen. It kills itself off. What we are looking at is the last gasp of the Big Pharma guys trying to shake down the taxpayers of the USA for a pile of money while they run off shore with the money . All of this before the USA runs out of cash trying to pay for the retirement situation that is coming in 2015. They all know that any flu epidemic can be contained by a campaign to support hand washing. There is no threat except of stupid people. The fact that a foreign nation is now going to make large quantities of the drug Tamiflu threatens the money in this con game.
Tamiflu, assuming Bird Flu were to mutate into a dangerous flu "Pandemic", would be of no value. The disease kills in about 9 days. It is symptomatic only 2 of those days. By the time a person knew they were getting sick, getting a prescription would not save them. Its value is probably null anyway as it appears it is ineffective against the disease. Its only value would be prophalaxis and that is questionable. Taiwan is just raiding the money game here.
This is state sponsored terrorism using a "virus" as a mafia enforcer threat to shake its people down for money. This is because vaccination is also of no value against bird flu as it kills fertile eggs. (The place one would make a vaccine) In reality there is only one defense against the bird flu. It is nothing more nor less than a public campaign for good hygene and hand washing. That program would so devastate the healthcare industry by negating their profits that nobody is going to consider it. Sorry folks it is all about money. Thanks to Taiwan, the international floating crap game has been raided. Maybe the whole US monopoly will come down on this one and we all will be better off including those of us in the USA.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
That logic is simply ridiculous, with the high population densities of cities and the speed and frequency with which people travel. You're seriously suggesting that a human-transmissible bird flu wouldn't be a "viable pathogen" because it would kill everyone in Taiwan too quickly to spread? Even if that were true, which is isn't, wouldn't you expect the Taiwanese to be concerned about that?
The idea that a human-transmissible bird flu would be dangerous has already been demonstrated by the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 20-50 million people. The 1918 virus was recently reconstructed, and it was found to be very similar to the bird flu viruses that are around in Asia today. The actual scientific paper, available here [sciencemag.org] states:
"Until now, the exceptional virulence of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus has been a question of historical curiosity. Herein, we demonstrate the successful reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus in order to understand more fully the virulence of this virus and possibly of other human influenza pandemic viruses. Because the emergence of another pandemic virus is considered likely, if not inevitable (25), characterization of the 1918 virus may enable us to recognize the potential threat posed by new influenza virus strains, and it will shed light on the prophylactic and therapeutic countermeasures that will be needed to control pandemic viruses."
Tamiflu, assuming Bird Flu were to mutate into a dangerous flu "Pandemic", would be of no value. The disease kills in about 9 days. It is symptomatic only 2 of those days. By the time a person knew they were getting sick, getting a prescription would not save them. Its value is probably null anyway as it appears it is ineffective against the disease. Its only value would be prophalaxis and that is questionable.
A scientific paper demonstrating Tamiflu's effectiveness against the H5N1 virus is here
A paper demonstrating Tamiflu's effectiveness against the 1918 flu virus (which is similar to the virus we fear will emerge) is here. [pnas.org]
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it kills itself off, eventually. In 1918, the Spanish Flu (a variant of bird flu) took with it about 50 million people. It killed more people than World War I. A repeat of that incident is what everyone is so scared about.
That said, it is impo
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that Taiwan is doing the right thing, since the manufacturer of the bird flu drugs did not want to sell them the drugs for a price they were able/willing to pay.
I believe the rules for negotiating price are a bit different when one of the parties can write the law
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Insightful)
You bring up an interesting point. Look at it this way: The Taiwanese government, charged with the protection of their citizens, and taxing them for that very purpose, never saw fit to invest in their own safeguards against plagues like the bird flu. Nor does the Taiwanese government see fit to pay now the cost of such an investment, which Roche made for its own reasons.
So the Taiwanese government won't save its own citizens, and won't pay someone else to save its own citizens, but will gladly steal the res
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that the government of other countries should be denied the same policy choice that the US made in the 1800s?
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jerks like you will put a price in dollars on fucking anything, even your grandmother.
And you find nothing wrong with this.
Ever wondered why people are willing to die hurling airliners into your skyscrapers????
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Informative)
Jerks like you will put a price in dollars on fucking anything, even your grandmother.
And you find nothing wrong with this.
Ever wondered why people are willing to die hurling airliners into your skyscrapers????
Why is this being modded interesting/insightful? The ad hominem virtually overwhelms any merit to be found in the more relevant (and quite valid) point against the life vs. property/money concept.
The reference endorsing the 9
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
José Serra, the Health Minister in the previous administration in Brazil (he unsuccessfully ran for president in 2002, losing in the runoff election to the current president, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, and is now mayor of the city of São Paulo), was responsible for Brazil's AIDS policy, which has been very successful and is recognized as a model for government AIDS policies worldwide. One major part of the policy included making the best AIDS drugs available to patients free. The problem is that the drug companies were jacking up the prices, and Brazil's AIDS budget was not going to be large enough to be able to continue this critical part of the policy that had been so successful in controlling the spread of AIDS and the number of AIDS-related deaths.
Serra tried to negotiate with the multinational pharmaceutical companies selling the AIDS drugs in Brazil, but they didn't want to negotiate. Serra showed them that he had the power, in the event of a national emergency, to make a declaration permitting Brazilian companies to break patents. He told them it would not be difficult to make the case of AIDS being a national emergency. One of the two companies decided to negotiate and rolled back some of its price increases. The other (Roche) balked, so Serra went ahead with the process of issuing the permission to break the patent.
The pharmaceutical companies got the US government to complain to the WTO, but the complaint was eventually dropped. The pharmaceutical companies negotiated with the Brazilian government (the negotiations continued through the change of administrations and are still ongoing, nearly three years after the change) and the Brazilian government continues to buy the drugs.
FWIW, Serra is very highly respected by health professionals in Brazil. In addition to standing up to the multinational pharmaceutical companies on the AIDS drugs, he also stood up to them on generic drugs. He helped push through a new policy permitting generic drugs in Brazil, greatly reducing the cost of medications for the Brazilian people. The pharmaceutical companies, for obvious (but shameful) reasons, opposed the introduction of generics in Brazil. Brave guy. Lula, the current president, is also man of exceptional bravery, having been one of the founders of Brazil's labor movement when the government of Brazil was a right-wing military dictatorship, but that's another story. In addition to the accomplishments mentioned above Serra was responsible for pushing through a modern organ donation law in Brazil.
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Informative)
In your kneejerk rush to shill for the multina
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
In these licensing agreements, however, is a clause that allows the government, in an emergency, to manufacture the drug/vaccine/whatever, or give a license to another manufacturer to increase supply of the product. So they're not invoking eminent domain to seize IP, they're availing themselves of a contractual provision. Among other things, this means the gov't doesn't have to compensate the IP holder.
See, for example, section 5.04(b) of the Model PHS Patent License Aggreement--Exclusive, available here [nih.gov].
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Informative)
got any evidence to support this outrageous statement? Change "Most of the" to "Occasionally." If you don't think pharamceutical companies do basic research, you are crazy.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't mean they have a right to profit, it's only to claim out of pocket expenses. In this case since it is virtual property that has already paid for it's own research, it has only cost the company potential profit. They should have sold the license for a reasonable amount but they refused, now they get nothing.
It's about time more goverments took this bargaining approach to make drugs available to those who need them and to stomp on those who see $$$ signs in other peoples misery. Sure we need profitable drug companies, it's not cheap to get a new drug to market. However in return for expenditure by the drug companies, taxpayers contribute serious money to police the quality (and patents) of the drugs.
Everyone is a victim of a disease at one time or another and lack of sanitation and quality medicines will turn a "simple" illness into a death sentence. In the interests of public health, governments should have an obligation to demand reasonable contributions from patients, taxpayers and drug companies. If patent law gets in the way, change it.
Re:Not right! (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell that to all the people forced out of homes or businesses for amounts of money that are far below what their property is assesed at when they refuse to sell for the government's ridiculously low offers. They just say "well, tough luck, we're taking it anyway and that's all you're getting, assessments be damned".
Re:must be done carefully though, in both cases (Score:5, Informative)
Now that Roche have got themselves a nice protectionism program going with the patent system, they don't think any other company, or nation in this case, should do to them what they did to their UK competitors. If any of the founding bandits were still haunting the boardroom at Roche, they would recognize the supreme justice of the current situation.
Nothing new here.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't appear that Taiwan honors foreign patents via treaty: http://www.bpmlegal.com/pctco.html [bpmlegal.com] http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/plt/ [wipo.int] , but I may be wrong.
The US has done basically the same thing with US patents which have "national security" implications. In the US, the Constitutional authority for patents lies in Congress, so Congress is perfectly free to decide whether patent protection should/is offered for such things. I don't profess to know such specifics about Taiwan.
Re:Nothing new here.... (Score:3, Informative)
This is particularly sticky because some countries buy the Chinese party line that Taiwan is a province of the PRC, and others superficially (few officially) recognize Taiwan as sovreign. Taiwan didn't sign the Berne Convention on copyrights (not patents, I know the difference), and Taiwan isn't a WIPO member.
Does Switzerland or the EU formally recognize Taiwan as distinct from the PRC?
Two Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
If this was a one shot magic bullet cure for cancer, aids, ect I think few would object to the suspension of the normal rules.
Unfortunatly, Aids gets resistant rapidly to the current generation of drugs, so you have to have a constant ammount of research going into it (more money).
But if the drugs are outragiously expensive, people die.
If
Re:Two Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Two Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Cites? Sources? Empirical studies published in accredited, peer-reviewed journals? Sounds like X-Files garbage to me.
Thousands of people (obviously not enough) with multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease or AIDS are being left aside dying and/or suffering on the altar of profit and (I guess mostly) s
Re:Not right! (Score:4, Insightful)
What about "Corporations are global citizens and have to look out for everyone, not just their already too huge profits."
Re:Not right! (Score:4, Interesting)
Because, to quote Dow (buyers of Union Carbide and inheritors of the Bhopal Disaster legacy)
And I doubt their shareholders will support you (nor will the US govt) since one of the answers to this Dow statement (by a Dow shareholder) was
Remember that we're talking about tens of thousands of deaths, still ongoing...
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Insightful)
You've been had. Dow did not make that statement. Have a look at the wikipedia entry for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_Disaster [wikipedia.org] . In particular, scroll down to the bottom and read about "The Yes Men". The statement you quoted was a hoax.
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Informative)
China already has to get involved. The precurser chemical for Tamiflu is shikimic acid, which can only be derived from a plant called star anise. The only sources of significant quantities of that variety of star anise in the world are four provinces in China. One company has contracted to buy the whole crop of star anise.
Guess which company?
Re:Not right! (Score:4, Insightful)
Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws. Let's say that AIDS was declared such a disease. Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
The problem with patent-law violation reasoning is that it seems to be without regard to the future. It's the same logic that leads to other poor policies (who cares about the environment! It's not messed up today).
If patent protection isn't required for drug development, where are the "open source" drugs? It only requires a few billion USD to develop drug lines... I'm sure there is plenty of non-profit, non-patent money to fund that, and so we can do away with the entire patent system.
Oh, and addressing this specifically: if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Interesting)
Talk about being nice..
Re:Not right! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
There already is almost no motivation for private sector research into dealing with epidemics. The market for vaccines just isn't very lucrative compared to things like allergy treatments or impotency cures, and the market size is spotty and unpredictable. Without big profits to chase, major funding for significant advances in these areas will have to be driven by government funding anyway, so dropping the patent incentive would be no big loss.
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm high on all of them
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm, what incentive is there for a private company to find a cure for a disease? It's much more cost efficient when the patient has to buy the medication in regular intervals for the rest of his/her life (see diabetes, AIDS, asthma, etc etc).
This is not a theoretical statement, but current practice. I've heard of research projects getting their commercial fundings withdrawn, because they were about to develop a permanent cure instead of a temporal one.
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Please. Stating this is current practice requires some level of "These guys are doing it with a treatment for disease X". Other wise this statement is no better than me saying I was kidnapped by aliens yesterday.
You know, I actually asked this once. (Score:4, Informative)
But that's a rather weak case [csicop.org], so never mind.
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Insightful)
If its a threat to a great many people, then perhaps those tax dollars we pay should go to funding a cure for the people.
Maybe it is a crazy idea, but there should be some way to meet at the middle on this one. You have to balance endangering the industries profits versus the common wealth of the people.
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Interesting)
An editorial in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, possibly the most authoritative source in the field, pointed out how drug companies spend far more money in marketing than they do in research. Also, drug companies often outsource the pure R&D to little-known laboratories, or buy patents from them, just to re-brand the products. I've been involved in research on levosimendan, created by Finnish Orion Corp., only to be licensed as Simdax® by Abbott Laboratories, Inc.
I figure that when push comes to shove, there's money to be made even from "open source" drugs. The so-called generic drugs, although not as profitable as your typical anti-depressant or branded statin, are a good, perfectly open source market for many companies.
Personally, I do believe in using "force" on private companies when emergencies arise. This might entail paying a forfeitary fee (kinda like compulsory licensing [wikipedia.org] in music.)
Force (of money) is what drug companies use to get (partially connivent) physicians to prescribe one expensive, proprietary drug over a generic one, even if the benefits of the former are unproven.
Force of marketing (as in "ad bombing") is what drug companies use to get unwitting patients to ask their doctors for Plavix®, even though saving one life with Plavix® may cost millions of dollars which could be spent elsewhere more usefully. That is, especially in countries where resources are limited and the health care system is public, that money could save more lives if used for screening programs and promotion of healthy lifestyle, for example.
Sheer force of money is also what gets people to buy Aleve (naproxene sodium) over, well... Naproxen sodium in its cheaper, unbranded, but otherwise perfectly equivalent form!
So be it: fsck them for Greater Good. Granted, a better definition for "Greater Good" would be useful.
Proportion? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you are underestimating the possibilities of this bird flu.
it could wipe out world stock markets for a decade.
Its in your interests for all governments to catch this one early and effectively, whatever methods they use.
If it appears, then there will be desperate attempts to stop it, for example you can be sure that any country that has a pandemic and is isolateable will have anything that moves over its boarders terminated with extreme
Re:Not right! (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be nice. The government is really good at doing research. Unfortunately, they are very bad at producing stuff. But it doesn't matter in this case. They could do just the research, companies would take care of the production.
The companies who can produce it for cheaper wins. Or they might all specialize in certain fields. The government certifies tha
Re:This oughta be good (Score:5, Insightful)
-
Taxpayers through university research
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Private funds (look at all the money raised by fund-raising for AIDS, breast cancer, MS, etc)
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Charities, philanthropy, etc.
The drug companies have a much lower efficiency in terms of money spent per researcher in their labs vis. the people doing research at universities for their post-docs, so when you factor that in, the inbalance is even greater towards the public sector.Re:Not right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. People hate the USA because people like you are ignorant, and associate everything you don't like with the USA.
Roche is Swiss.
I would rather see the drug not manufactured than witheld from needy people.
That is certainly an option. If we tear down the patent system, perhaps we can insure that many, many drugs never get developed, and so never manufactured. We all die equally.
Btw, Tiawan can afford the drug. The amount of money in the corruption-fueled grey economy of corrupt officials is more than enough to buy the drugs. Just check out the world-wide corruption studies in The Economist for evidence. It's not about lack of money in Tiawan, but about priorities of spending (bribing MPs is more important than buying drugs - so break the patents).
Re:Not right! (Score:5, Insightful)
However:
That is certainly an option. If we tear down the patent system, perhaps we can insure that many, many drugs never get developed, and so never manufactured. We all die equally.
That is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that the fact that virtually all funding and support for military development comes from the public sector, that the US government is the patent-holder on important security technology patents, has led to a moribund pace of innovation in weapons technology? Hardly. There are many, many ways to fund research and distribution, and your belief that only a crude market model is effective is just that - a principle of faith.
We're dying under the current system (Score:5, Insightful)
We are now. I know many older Americans skipping or cutting down on their meds because they can't afford them. People without insurance can't afford brand name drugs as it is. The reality is people are dying now because they can't afford insurance and proper health care, including some of those 500 dollar prescriptions.
Perhaps you meant "many, many drugs for people who have insurance will never get developed." Which might be true. All in all, I think having fewer drugs more widely affordable would be a step ahead of where we are today.
If those windfall profits were actually going into R&D, I'd have more sympathy for the big name drug makers. But the bulk of those profits are going toward enhancing shareholder value, making rich people even more rich. Otherwise how can drug makers ship drugs to Canada who then sells them back to our own citizens for less than we can buy them here? Canadian pharmacies are still making a profit. The only way that math works is the certain knowledge that we're getting boned on drug prices.
What you say is true from one narrow perspective but not on the macro scale. Drugs are likely only to be the first patents ignored on the world market. Technology might be next. Perhaps you've noticed the really hot tech doesn't premiere here anymore. The new buzz phrase is "No word on when it will be available in the US." Maybe never.
As our patent system becomes ever more litigious and retarded more countries are going to be tempted to bust technology patents for use in their own country.
And, of course, we can't take on patent reform without first making sure all those people in bankruptcy because of catastrophic medical expenses go to credit counseling and pay back their credit card bills and that we shield those poor gun makers from legal liability. Those are obviously hugely important compared to poor people dying, and old people we're almost dead anyway, but I'm sure our Republican servants of the people will get to that patent thing just any day now.
Re:We're dying under the current system (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple.
U.S. sales are subsidising Canadian sales.
Re:We're dying under the current system (Score:3, Insightful)
You want to know how much real percent of cost of developing and manufacturing drugs is? Maybe 35%-40%. All the rest is pure profit.
It is called lack of competition.
It's FAR worse than that... (Score:3, Insightful)
So far this "epidemic" has claimed 60 lives. While it is tragic for those families, it isn't a return of the plague.
The disease is not currently jumping from bird -> human except in cases of HEAVY contact, and there is no human -> human jumping.
In previous "bird flu" epidemics, illegal versions of the drugs were used to treat birds by poor farmers rightfully fearing losing their livelihood. As a re
money not the problem. supply doesn't make demand (Score:3, Interesting)
Taiwan does have the money, but the BBC article failed to point out that Roche has been insufficient in supplying Tamiflu to meet worldwide demand. Taiwanese government plans to address the supply issue by manufacturing the drug in solutions. This has at least two benefits:
I don't blame them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:5, Insightful)
The majority of the expenses associated with new drug discovery are actually made in the public sector - by Universities and so forth. In broad outline the story is very similar to the Internet, also developed at public expense.
Now, the private sector does contribute significant additional resources to drug development. HOWEVER, these additional resources are a *fraction* of the total increase in drug prices that result from the patents they are awarded (vs. what the same drugs would cost if prices were governed by a free market.)
The upshot is that if you look at it over the long run, we would be much better off if we violated all the patents, let the patent-dependent drug companies go out of business, and funded an equivalent amount of research in the public sector, making the results available to anyone who wished to sell the resulting drugs on the market.
The research I'm citing here was done by a fellow named Dean Baker [cepr.net]. I'll dig up an exact ref if you like.
Fallacies (Score:3, Interesting)
Private R&D spending on pharmaceuticals exceeds public R&D spending. This is actually true for R&D in general ($132 billion federal vs. $190 billion industry), and it's true for pharmaceuticals ($30 billion federal vs. $49 billion industry). For the first 3 figures, see here:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rd06main.htm [aaas.org] [chapters 2 & 4]
For the last figure, see
Re:Fallacies (Score:4, Interesting)
When I said "public" I meant to include non-profits as well as "private" universities; non-indutry would be a better term - in my lab this equals about 20% of federal funding, which is probably about typical, although in cancer research is it much, much higher.
I would say that you should also include a variety of tax-breaks - often at the State level - which are given in some way theoretically conditioned on R&D, as non-industry funding. State governments, or funds that pass through state agencies in one way or another (from tuition, etc.) also pay, indirectly, a varying but sometimes significant portion of the cost for research at some state universities, the accounting is not transparent so this is much more difficult to tally. So the State share is non-zero, but hard to say how big it really is.
Industry also spends a significant amount on R&D actually located in Universities, but I'm pretty sure they include that in their filing. My lab gets hardly any industry money but my Dad gets a fair amount.
On the other hand, Columbia (my institution) in particular makes a fair amount of money from patent income, and it would be highly disingenuous of me to include that in the "non-industry" R&D total, given what I am proposing.
Finally, the federal number has not grown as much as I would have expected, I haven't actually seen these numbers for a few years, I'm pretty sure that the Federal pharma R&D was bigger when last I looked.
Anyway, thank you for the correction, but you can change "most" to "comparable amounts" in my original post it doesn't really change anything.
Your prediction is simply not holding up to recent history - my evidence here in anecdotal, but when a scientist develops a new drug, they start up a little company - so that they can sell the patent to Pfizer. For them to actually make the drug themselves depends on assumptions regarding low cost of entry which simply do not hold in this case. The result of this is that we have a sustained oligopoly which will not fix itself through competition, and is in fact becoming more entrenched.
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:5, Informative)
How were the mechanisms of blood pressure regulation discovered (picking a drug from that list at random)?
The techniques commonly used to perform high throughput screening of new drugs - who discovered those?
The synthetic organic chemistry required to actually *make* all these novel compounds? Where do you think that was developed?
The research in fundamental biology has been absolutely *essential* to the development of modern pharmaceuticals - every bit as vital as DARPAnet was to the creation of the internet.
Yes, it's true, the public sector does not develop drugs - because when public sector entities get close to developing a drug, they sell their data to a drug company to let the drug company finish the process. However, this is not a law of nature - or even of convenience. It's a massively inefficient mess, with huge amounts of wasted effort and redundant work, driven entirely by the patent system (and the desire by University administrations to secure the profit from those patents.)
Here are the refs:
(journal articles)
"Patent fiction," Health Letter (Washington, DC): vol. 20, iss. 6, Jun 2004; p. 1.
"A Free market solution to prescription drug crises," Challenge (Armonk, NY): vol. 46, iss. 5, Sep/Oct 2003; pg. 76
"Medicines and the New Economics Environment," Journal of Public Health Policy (South Burlington, VT): vol. 23, iss. 2, 2002; p. 245.
(also a policy paper you should read)
"Bird Flu Fears: Is There a Better Way to Develop Drugs?" Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, October 2005
"Bigger Than the Social Security Crisis: Wasteful Spending on Prescription Drugs", Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 2005
"The Benefits to State Governments from the Free Market Drug Act," Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, November 2004
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I am not proposing that we pay the estate of Sir Isaac Newton royalties every time we use newtonian mechanics - but it is equally absurd to pay royalties to any other scientist, given the collaborative and accumulative nature of science. This is an auxillary point, and to cover it in detail we'd have to go into the many ways in which a typical pharmaceutical patent is very d
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who does this for a living -- what you're saying is absolutely, positive
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:5, Insightful)
In many specific cases, corporate decision makers may make better choices than the public sector regarding allocation of resources, I don't want to get into a discussion of this as a general principle - however, you seem to have taken this as a religious creed.
I'll raise exactly one counter-example: Should fire departments be run as for-profit enterprises, and only purchase fire trucks in jurisdictions where they can make money charging for fire protection services? Drug research is high tech, but it is a question of public health and safety, and the fundamental decisions should be made with that in mind - so it is more like the fire department, and less like high end consumer electronics.
Beyond that, corporate decision makers are also very corrupt. For example, in the vioxx case, concealing the evidence of deaths, and so forth. In the case of ipods this really isn't a big deal - so the screen scratches now, so what? But when people like that make public health decisions, other people die.
Shifting all drug control resource allocation to the NIH (or a parallel body structured along the same lines) - would not only make better decisions than corporate power centers, it would also make them a transparent way, subject to the full force of peer review. This isn't a 100% guarantee against fraudulent research, but it's a good start!
So, we get better decisions and we get them at a huge costs savings - no need even to rock the boat, we can simply hire the entire existing research apparatus of the american drug industry, let them keep their current generous salaries, and we can spend a tiny fraction of the savings giving them government-employee retirement benefits.
To continue this discussion I'd have to get into the nitty gritty of decisions that pharmaceutical companies have made in the past, and why they have been so disastrous.
If it makes you feel any better, this is really capitalist solution.
Which is a greater distortion of the market: granting patents, or increasing (by about two fold) the money the government spends on life sciences research? Certainly, if the government is making free R&D available to anyone who wants it, that is a market distortion of a kind. In the past, similar market distortions have lead to epic disasters like the Internet, also the modern aerospace indudstry, sattelite communications, am I leaving out any other great mistakes of 20th century America? My god, what fools we where, to meddle with the market!
Anyway, the drugs would still be manufactured by for-profit companies, they'd just be manufactured in a true market, without the market distortions introduced by patents, which is actually a purer form of capitalism, isn't it?
Re:What industry? (Score:3, Insightful)
A government agency is more competent than private industry? You've never worked for government, have you?
at the same time, government financing of R&D should, as a policy question, be expanded to take up the slack.
So, instead of the funding being voluntary (through private industry research) you want it to be involuntary (through tax dollars).
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today."
You're right that that's the rationale used to justify the state of things today. And if it had any relation to current practice I'd be prone to agree with you. Unfortunately, there are a few minor data points that tend to indicate the reasoning you outline above consists mostly of horse waste:
Drug research is expensive - nobody argues that. What is arguable, however, is how ethically pharmaceutical companies have acquitted their important social role. On that count, it seems that they've failed miserably, and, just as a criminal deserves to have his legal rights restricted, they deserve to have their patent rights restricted unless they demonstrate that they will not abuse this trust.
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:5, Insightful)
And regardless, Big Pharma is enormously profitable, for all their claimed "woes".
If the profit margin was slimmer, companies would still make pharmaceuticals. If nobody went into business if they weren't guaranteed pharma-class profits, there'd be a lot of industries that wouldn't exist. Grocery stores, for instance, are inherently low-margin businesses. Yet they haven't looked at their 1-2% profit margins and said, "Feh! I quit!"
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all about risk and value add. Grocery stores (to use the parent's example) take almost no risk and add almost no value. They are distributors.
I once saw a study comparing the profit margin of Wendy's (a US hamburger chain) and grocery strores, and then looking at all fast-food resturants and all grocery strores. Because of the value-add component of prepared food, profit
Marketting vs R&D (Score:3, Informative)
On page 60 of Mercks 2004 annual report
2004 Merck spent
$4.9B on Materials and Manufacturing
$7.3B on Marketting & Administration
$4B on R&D
To be fair the administration expenses should be a large part of that expense, but it seems clear that more money is spent on researching and producing the drugs than selling them.
Re:I don't blame them. (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope you get modded +5 insightful. I never thought of this, but it is an interesting line of reasoning. I think you are right, although I've never thought of it. And if you are right, it is scary.
To say your position another way: Curing cancer is good. However, charging money for the cure is bad. Therefore, no one can fund finding a cure. Therefore, no cure, which is bad. So o
A Simple Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents are market distortions - every bit as much as tariffs and trade barriers.
More traditional exercise of emminent domain recognizes similar principles, by the way - the government gets to set the price, the owners of the property can't hold out for more than market value in the event that there is an emergency and sudden demand.
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
At any rate, at the very least, the government can just take what it wants in the name of national security. It's what the US government did many times with new technologies that were needed for the war effort during World War II...
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:3, Informative)
Obligatory Monty Python Quote... (Score:5, Funny)
No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, isn't it, eh? Beautiful plumage!
Nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
This has happened before (Score:5, Informative)
Good luck to 'em all, I say; saving lives trumps patents.
Re:This has happened before (Score:3, Informative)
Given the current climate of fear with respect to the bird flu scare, I would imagine Taiwan will ultimately face little opposition for such a move.
Wikipedia sez... (Score:5, Informative)
Government at its finest (Score:3, Insightful)
Then they allow tort laws to get out of control, letting you get sued for billions.
They make you wait a decade for approval (or not).
They offer you a monopoly on your invention.
Then they take it back so their friends and family in pharmaceuticals can make it with zero of your costs involved.
Re:Government at its finest (Score:4, Interesting)
But you're confusing the Taiwanese government and the US. The above applies to the Americans- what the Taiwanese has done is perfectly understandable and akin to what people have said about AIDS drugs.
Some profit is acceptable. At what point do you tell a company to just fuck off? How much higher profit can they have before you start thinking they're asking just too much? They're already making much better margins than many other industries.
And morally/ethically: how much are you willing to give to a foreign company to potentially save your countrymen and women's lives?
Re:Government at its finest (Score:5, Funny)
"Eminent Domain" for "Intellectual Property" (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the US Constitution guarantees reasonable compensation for seized property. This doesn't have to be cash. It can be some other equitable consideration.
For example, if Disney would surrender almost all of their old television cartoons and theatrical movies into the public domain (where they should have lapsed years ago), the US could reciprocate and give a *permanent* protection for a few of their most prized revenue source characters: Mickey Mouse and Disney's Ariel (the Little Mermaid). The population could make whatever artistic mashup they wanted from the footage, but they couldn't claim the Mouse as theirs or claim the Mouse speaks for them. If I understand, this is somewhat like the protection Britain has given Peter Pan: it's a special cultural treasure and is handled different from other properties.
Another example is for pharmaceuticals: break an effective AIDS drug patent, and we'll let you keep a certain lifestyle drug like Viagra for a longer period.
Unfortunately, Disney and Pfizer have bought enough Senators to choke the Panama Canal, and so the trade in all of their products will be protected nearly forever anyway, even without surrendering the cultural feedstock and the life-saving inventions to society as a whole.
allowed by WTO/TRIPS (Score:5, Informative)
This is a hot topic in the international trade community for developing countries, especially in relation to AIDS drugs.
Patents are at the pleasure of the Sovereign (Score:3, Insightful)
Since property and patents are at the pleasure of the Sovereign, the Sovereign is free to revoke it at any time. This is called escheat. In fact, if you die without an heir, your property automatically escheats to the Sovereign.
So, a Soveriegn of a State, can legally revoke any patent of his own granting at any time. Other than because of a treaty obligation, a Sovereign State need not recognize or allow a Patent granted by another state.
Here in the US, our Founders were well aware (and sometimes the personal victims) of the abuses and escheats at the hands of the British Sovereign. So all the above was modified by our constitution which says that property may not be seized except with "due process of law". The Congress has also set up horrible "patent and copyright" laws. Obviously, Taiwan has different laws.
It's OK to "steal" to preserve life (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. St. Thomas Aquinas addresses this in ST II-II.66.7 [newadvent.org]. "It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need." Although this would not be a "secret" taking (it's in the headlines!), the principle still replies. IF (and I stress the "if" because I have no idea what the price tag was) Roche is truly being unreasonable in their demands, and IF (ditto) the need to act now is truly extreme, then the Taiwanese government does have the right to act in violation of the patent.
dear /. eds. - it's "infringement" , not violation (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the language all English speaking jurisdictions use. So why choose such an emotionally laden word like violation ??
Australia4 5/top.htm [law.gov.au]
PATENTS ACT 1990 (Cth)
Chapter 11--Infringement
http://www.scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/1/5
USAs c_sup_01_35_10_III_20_28.html [cornell.edu]
CHAPTER 28--INFRINGEMENT OF PATENTS
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode35/u
UK
s60 - s71 Infringement
http://www.jenkins-ip.com/patlaw/index.htm [jenkins-ip.com]
Eminent Domain? (Score:3, Insightful)
USA also threatened to ignore patent (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, patents are NOT property! (Score:3, Insightful)
FYI, patents are a personal monopoly granted by the government, not a natural law property right. They are not anything like regular property that has natural physical limits in supply and demand and no expiration date. Properties are about controlling limited resources, not about controlling people. They are not a valad property right any more than slaves on the plantation in 1850, and considering all the people they kill by locking out cures for diseases, and life saving innovations that were likely to happen in natural progression of things anyhow, they are agruably worse.
The most crazy part is that people say they promote R&D when patents really kill it. Patnets skew R&D so that researchers don't collaberate, and so that cheap inexpensive pratical cures to diseases are shuned and even attacked.
Seriously, if you steal my car I think I would be very violated and deprived of my transportation, but if you make a copy of it - hell have 10! The notion that copying and immitation is a form of stealing is bullshit morality, and the people who impose it are really the ones who are immoral.
But what about the biotech inventors? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is particularly unfortunate is that many drugs (including tamiflu and the superior inhaled drug relenza) were invented by relatively small biotechs. (OK, Gilead isn't small any more, but Biota is *tiny*). Small biotechs are absolutely reliant on the fees and royalties they generate through licensing their inventions to Big Pharma, who have the money to get them through the FDA approval process and marketed.
Break a patent for Roche or GSK, they'll be annoyed but hardly notice the change in cash-flow. The biotech, however, will lose its sole cash-flow life-line. Biota are collaborating with Japanese pharma Sankyo to produce a second-generation antiviral for influenza that looks like being needed once-weekly for both prophylaxis and treatment. Be a real pity to destroy promising biotech-level research like that by cutting profits at the Big Pharma end of town.
Disclaimer: Yes I work for a biotech - own shares in them too.
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Basic Principle Of Government (Score:3, Insightful)
Spoken like one truly ignorant of history.
The fundamental purpose of government is to protect the rights of citizens. And if you think life is more important than rights, you're outvoted daily by the thousands who risk their lives to leave governments who don't protect their rights.
Re:I Agree, but... (Score:5, Informative)