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The pharma and media industries are so similar. Both lobby governments for passing bills to support their business models. Both rely on questionable extensions
by option_greek 14y ago
The pharma and media industries are so similar. Both lobby governments for passing bills to support their business models. Both rely on questionable extensions to IP rights and make loud noises about how much money they lose on piracy and generics.
There has to be something fundamentally screwed up to have this much conflict of interest between public good and IP rights.
- gaius 14y agoWhere's the public good if these drugs are never developed in the first place?
- option_greek 14y agoWhether they would be developed if industry margins go down is a contentious issue. They seem to do just fine despite the competition from generics. In general everything related to biology seem to suffer from the problem of high cost . There got to be a lot of inefficiency some where to sustain such high cost. It need not necessarily be human inefficiency. Just like computers moved from being as big and costly as big buildings to being very affordable (raspberry pi) - thanks to the invention of transistor, there must be some kind of bottle neck that can be targeted first to advance the whole field. You can't do that by simply throwing more money at it. You have to create incentives to attack the inefficiencies.
- gaius 14y agoGenerics are not directly competing with newly-discovered drugs, but they do reduce the funding available for that discovery.