2 ms·

Technically drugs have the same patent lifespan (3 years You might be thinking of New Clinical Investigation Exclusivity, which is 3 years, and is an entirely

Technically drugs have the same patent lifespan (3 years You might be thinking of New Clinical Investigation Exclusivity, which is 3 years, and is an entirely different thing. https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/ucm079031.htm https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/ucm0790... Drug patents last 20 years, same as any other patent. The patent expiration tricks you describe don't... exist? (You do have to patent the entire molecule.) Pfizer made a hojillion dollars from Vigara. Its patent expired in 2012, and it's now a generic. "From 1996 to 2012 under the trade name Lipitor, atorvastatin became the world's best-selling drug to that point, with more than US$125 billion in sales". Lipitor is a generic now, and is dirt cheap. If Pfizer could have keep Lipitor under patent, by any means at all, they would have! Drug companies make sequel compounds, sure, and market the heck out of them. But you don't have to buy them if you don't want to. The old drugs still exist. Your description of software patents is equally strange. You know patent examiners don't actually look at code, right? The process, or "apparatus" is described, and they award the patent based on that. You can rewrite the implementation all you want, as long as it's doing the same thing, it's covered by the same patent. You have do something different to get a different patent. What counts as "different" has, of course, been a topic of heated argument for the last two centuries.

greeneggs 10y ago
> "From 1996 to 2012 under the trade name Lipitor, atorvastatin became the world's best-selling drug to that point, with more than US$125 billion in sales" Also note that 1996 to 2012 is not 20 years. Drug trials eat up the patent time. This is problematic for some diseases, e.g., for cancer, where ideally you might prefer early-stage interventions or cures, but late-stage trials are faster to conclude and therefore can give drugs with longer patent protection.
mark-r 10y ago
Sometimes the drug companies will use tricks like finding some side effect in their current drug that makes it difficult/impossible for a generic version to get approved. But no worries, they've already invented and patented a replacement!

greeneggs 10y ago

> "From 1996 to 2012 under the trade name Lipitor, atorvastatin became the world's best-selling drug to that point, with more than US$125 billion in sales" Also note that 1996 to 2012 is not 20 years. Drug trials eat up the patent time. This is problematic for some diseases, e.g., for cancer, where ideally you might prefer early-stage interventions or cures, but late-stage trials are faster to conclude and therefore can give drugs with longer patent protection.

mark-r 10y ago

Sometimes the drug companies will use tricks like finding some side effect in their current drug that makes it difficult/impossible for a generic version to get approved. But no worries, they've already invented and patented a replacement!