4 ms·

There's already an FDA-approved, tried-and-tested method for delivering epinephrine: the one that Mylar has a patent on. It's stupid to force competitors to in

by badsock 10y ago

There's already an FDA-approved, tried-and-tested method for delivering epinephrine: the one that Mylar has a patent on. It's stupid to force competitors to invent a completely different method to do the same thing, and then have them try to get it through FDA approval, just because Mylar is unwilling to license the patent to competitors at a reasonable rate. The fact that a company can just flat-out stop an idea from being implemented by anyone else for 20 years is insanity. There needs to be a mechanism that incentivises patents being licensed, rather than withheld and used as an anti-competitive bludgeons. Something like a means of finding a reasonable value for a patent (hopefully via some market mechanism) that takes into account the cost of invention, and then requiring the patent be licensed for that amount to anyone. If you look at the situation with Microsoft and Android, it's crystal clear: the patents in question are pathetic, and yet they're being used to extort billions of dollars. It's such a massive distortion, and leads to huge duplication of effort and wasteful incompatibilities, and in this case lives at risk.

grandalf 10y ago
The patent system is full of tradeoffs. Maybe patents should only last for 3 years, maybe 10, etc. But for all its tradeoffs, patent protection does create an incentive for massive investment in R&D. It's difficult to imagine a meaningful counterfactual scenario. Of course, bad patent office execution (leading to patent trolling, etc.) is parasitic and harms the system as a whole. But what about the FDA? The FDA is notoriously overly risk-averse when it comes to approving new treatments. It simply should not be hard to get a competing delivery mechanism approved. It's easy to test, the test of whether the mechanism works can be repeated at nearly zero cost thousands of times, offering substantially more data than the typical drug approval process yields (when the question is whether a drug is safe long term). If you are an FDA regulator, the only way you can really lose your job and pension is by approving a drug that should not have been approved. Nobody is keeping score of the suffering and loss of life caused by sluggish approvals.
- badsock 10y ago
  I would argue that the FDA is that risk adverse because society is that risk adverse. And while I completely agree that those R&D billions should be compensated, when the go-to strategy for patents is to do a complete parallel re-invention rather than just pay the inventor, my stance is that the trade offs made by the current system are inefficient and damaging.

by badsock 10y ago

grandalf 10y ago

The patent system is full of tradeoffs. Maybe patents should only last for 3 years, maybe 10, etc. But for all its tradeoffs, patent protection does create an incentive for massive investment in R&D. It's difficult to imagine a meaningful counterfactual scenario. Of course, bad patent office execution (leading to patent trolling, etc.) is parasitic and harms the system as a whole. But what about the FDA? The FDA is notoriously overly risk-averse when it comes to approving new treatments. It simply should not be hard to get a competing delivery mechanism approved. It's easy to test, the test of whether the mechanism works can be repeated at nearly zero cost thousands of times, offering substantially more data than the typical drug approval process yields (when the question is whether a drug is safe long term). If you are an FDA regulator, the only way you can really lose your job and pension is by approving a drug that should not have been approved. Nobody is keeping score of the suffering and loss of life caused by sluggish approvals.

badsock 10y ago
I would argue that the FDA is that risk adverse because society is that risk adverse. And while I completely agree that those R&D billions should be compensated, when the go-to strategy for patents is to do a complete parallel re-invention rather than just pay the inventor, my stance is that the trade offs made by the current system are inefficient and damaging.