3 ms·

Can we just please abolish patents? Not just software patents, all of them. Can anyone give me an example of a patent issued in the last twenty years for a nove

by zanny 11y ago

Can we just please abolish patents? Not just software patents, all of them. Can anyone give me an example of a patent issued in the last twenty years for a novel invention that then proved wildly successful and either protected the inventor from competition or even more importantly led to a lawsuit where the creator successfully beat a large company trying to copy their idea? And even if you can - is the exception outweighing the social cost of the insanity that is our immense tumor of IP lawsuits and intellectual creativity restriction that comes with it? Fundamentally the courts are today rigged entirely for those who can afford the best lawyers and fight in a quagmire the longest. Even if you do invent something original, these large companies know they can just bleed you dry in court and ignore your patents anyway. Yet I do not personally see anyone not being inventive or trying new ideas in the absence of a working patent system to protect their monopoly rights to their ideas. Is anyone today waking up the morning thinking "I'm not going to try new ideas because I won't be able to defend patents I file for them against megacorps". I highly doubt that. The people that create the things that are most valuable to us are products of environments that enable them to conduct the research in the first place (IE, they often don't have to do day labor to survive, or can live very comfortably on reduced work hours) rather than incentivizing "inventors" as a discipline that uses the profits of a state granted monopoly to sustain their business. I mean, even when huge megacorps come up with novel ideas, their competitors will sick lawyers on it and find the closest approximation they can get while having the highest probability of defeating a patent violation lawsuit. And I really hope we are not writing IP law for the sole benefit of international corporations to fund an entire industry of lawyers to waste money arguing about the infringing width of a progress bar.

macintux 11y ago
Big pharma, for all its flaws, does in fact provide value. And drug research & development absolutely relies on patents. If you spend half a billion (or more) developing a drug and generic drug manufacturers can immediately sell it for a few cents a pill, how do you recoup your investment? I agree the patent system is broken, but abolishing it entirely isn't the answer. Perhaps revoking the business method patent decision is our best hope of regaining some level of sanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent#The_change_in_practice_in_the_1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent#The_cha...
- zanny 11y ago
  Currently, drug research is recouped through sales to consumers of the drug. Often, drugs researched and approved today are targeting extremely dire ailments, or are alternatives to those with allergies to common popular remedies. It is important to not just consider the position of a pharmaceutical research corporations impact on the economy but the broader picture. Their research is often subsidized by the dying and suffering, or in the era of the PPACA it might be subsidized in part by a corporation that has to spread out that burden broadly to all healthcare subscribers. The poor are sicker, on average, than the rich. Their reduced access to medicine makes their complications work, and the environments they are forced into often cause their more illness. The drug R&D system we have now disproportionately extracts its funding from everyone above medicaid (and even on medicaid you can only get partial drug coverage) and anyone below a reasonable standard of living. There are multiple ways to intervene into this system to produce as much research as we have now with an alternative funding model. Since the majority of the consumers of these drugs are on national healthcare programs (usually medicare or medicaid - old or poor) we could simply transition to expansive national funding programs for private research, or public drug R&D. The revenue barely shifts hands then, but the problem becomes that the state is an awful judge of value and as demonstrated by NASA or the DoD is a terrible judge of what deserves funding or how much to give. This system isn't even theoretical, Bernie and Obama have already proposed such laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa... The other consequence is that since IP and patents are pure fiction in reality and must be constructed as a state institution to enforce, countries like China and India can just ignore US patents on drugs, instead manufacturing and distributing the fruits of American and European labor (since we end up paying the overpriced patent prices) abroad for no cost. Is it worth aggressively pursuing research when the least able to afford it often ends up having to pay for it? How do we know that competitive drug research would not be done through institutional and charitable funding, like how a ton of other research works? Even in the absence of patents, there are upstart costs to building and manufacturing drugs. And within the drug industry, people often ignore that the most central reason why pharma R&D needs to spend so much ludicrous money is because of the FDA regulations involving getting their drugs approved. If drugs were more deregulated - less of a problem in the information age, when research can easily be distributed and problems broadcast internationally within minutes of discovery - we could dramatically cut the costs of research such that traditional manufacturing models, that have worked for years, could work the same for making pills. Personally, I think a combination of substantive deregulation (you could still have FDA approval, and even a law where doctors need to notify consumers when they are prescribing experimental drugs and the risks involved, but they would not be mandatory to start selling and profiting), research prizes, public funding, private charity (a lot of cancer research is charitable, and almost any ailment of great duress also gets incredible amounts of charitable research funding) and the recognition that using a guaranteed monopoly only enforced in the western world disproportionately hurts the sick, and thus hurts the elderly and poor who either have to pay partials under state coverage or have to pay entirely out of pocket.

by zanny 11y ago

macintux 11y ago

Big pharma, for all its flaws, does in fact provide value. And drug research & development absolutely relies on patents. If you spend half a billion (or more) developing a drug and generic drug manufacturers can immediately sell it for a few cents a pill, how do you recoup your investment? I agree the patent system is broken, but abolishing it entirely isn't the answer. Perhaps revoking the business method patent decision is our best hope of regaining some level of sanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent#The_change_in_practice_in_the_1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent#The_cha...

zanny 11y ago
Currently, drug research is recouped through sales to consumers of the drug. Often, drugs researched and approved today are targeting extremely dire ailments, or are alternatives to those with allergies to common popular remedies. It is important to not just consider the position of a pharmaceutical research corporations impact on the economy but the broader picture. Their research is often subsidized by the dying and suffering, or in the era of the PPACA it might be subsidized in part by a corporation that has to spread out that burden broadly to all healthcare subscribers. The poor are sicker, on average, than the rich. Their reduced access to medicine makes their complications work, and the environments they are forced into often cause their more illness. The drug R&D system we have now disproportionately extracts its funding from everyone above medicaid (and even on medicaid you can only get partial drug coverage) and anyone below a reasonable standard of living. There are multiple ways to intervene into this system to produce as much research as we have now with an alternative funding model. Since the majority of the consumers of these drugs are on national healthcare programs (usually medicare or medicaid - old or poor) we could simply transition to expansive national funding programs for private research, or public drug R&D. The revenue barely shifts hands then, but the problem becomes that the state is an awful judge of value and as demonstrated by NASA or the DoD is a terrible judge of what deserves funding or how much to give. This system isn't even theoretical, Bernie and Obama have already proposed such laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa... The other consequence is that since IP and patents are pure fiction in reality and must be constructed as a state institution to enforce, countries like China and India can just ignore US patents on drugs, instead manufacturing and distributing the fruits of American and European labor (since we end up paying the overpriced patent prices) abroad for no cost. Is it worth aggressively pursuing research when the least able to afford it often ends up having to pay for it? How do we know that competitive drug research would not be done through institutional and charitable funding, like how a ton of other research works? Even in the absence of patents, there are upstart costs to building and manufacturing drugs. And within the drug industry, people often ignore that the most central reason why pharma R&D needs to spend so much ludicrous money is because of the FDA regulations involving getting their drugs approved. If drugs were more deregulated - less of a problem in the information age, when research can easily be distributed and problems broadcast internationally within minutes of discovery - we could dramatically cut the costs of research such that traditional manufacturing models, that have worked for years, could work the same for making pills. Personally, I think a combination of substantive deregulation (you could still have FDA approval, and even a law where doctors need to notify consumers when they are prescribing experimental drugs and the risks involved, but they would not be mandatory to start selling and profiting), research prizes, public funding, private charity (a lot of cancer research is charitable, and almost any ailment of great duress also gets incredible amounts of charitable research funding) and the recognition that using a guaranteed monopoly only enforced in the western world disproportionately hurts the sick, and thus hurts the elderly and poor who either have to pay partials under state coverage or have to pay entirely out of pocket.