4 ms·

> Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D

by eps 13y ago

> Patents have always struck me as a bit like a mob protection racket Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? That's too a mob protection market for you? The concept of the patent protection is solid. It's the execution that went astray at some point when they started issuing very generic patents. Bitch about that.

chongli 13y ago
Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? Yeah, just as drug gangs invest large sums of money to try and expand their turf. The concept of the patent protection is solid. No, it isn't. It has big problems even in the pharma industry, especially as the gold rush on small molecules winds down. Patents are monopolies and monopolies are bad for consumers. The idea that we have to bribe inventors with such a dangerous power ought to be farcical and obviously wrong to most people at this point, yet it continues to be repeated. The other idea that markets will somehow align with the medical needs of the population is also wrong, as evidenced by the failure of health care in the US. If we want important medical research done we ought to do the obvious thing and pay universities and non-profit research labs/hospitals to do it. Hell, we're doing a ton of that already and then selling the patent rights away for pennies on the dollar.
- beloch 13y ago
  Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk, long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable commercial product. Private enterprise focuses on short-term, low-risk research and engineering, packaging, marketing, etc. to bring safe-bets to market. For every big-pharma dollar spent to produce a new drug, ten government dollars were probably spent to get the underlying science to the point where pharmacorps were willing to touch it, and a hundred dollars more of government funding probably went off on various other tangents that turned out to be dead-ends. On the other hand, academics often suck at commercializing their research. Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. You can't get journal publications out of your twentieth double-blind study looking for side-effects! Big pharma companies do perform a valuable service, but the rewards they receive are out of proportion. Multiple decades of monopoly are an unreasonable reward for performing this last step in development, especially when a lot of drug patents are the result of meaningless changes to existing products that are made solely to restart the monopoly clock! Taking academic research and turning it into a commercial product does take time and money, and without patents this crucial last-step might not be adequately incentivised. However, If corporations want exclusive rights to commercialize publicly funded research, perhaps the public deserves a cut. Perhaps Pfizer, etc. should be on the hook to help fund some of the taxpayer funded research they benefit from. Either that, or some alternative way to fund commercialization of academic research needs to be found.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    >Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. This sounds like an excellent argument for doing away with medical patents and replacing them with financial incentives (like a percentage of revenue tax on anyone who sells the new drug for a few years) with proceeds going to whoever paid for the clinical trials.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I have to be persnickety about this. A patent is a monopoly in the same way all property rights are monopolies: you get the exclusive right to use something. That's different from an economic monopoly on say a particular market. Now, one can lead to the other. If you own all the land around say a train station, you can leverage that into a monopoly on retail for travelers. But that incidental to the fact that a property right in land is a monopoly. As for the pharma industry in the US it's been tremendously successful. The US leads the world in medical technology. The flaws of our healthcare system are an access problem and a distribution problem.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >A patent is a monopoly in the same way all property rights are monopolies: you get the exclusive right to use something. If you wrap ideas and physical objects up in a box called "something," you've begged the question.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Not at all. There are lots of inchoate property rights. For example, the right to cut through someone's land. You don't own the land, so the property right is inchoate. Or consider the right to buy or sell another right (an option). Also inchoate, but a property right nonetheless. Indeed, these days, your bank account is an inchoate property right. Just the right to a particular configuration of bits. The problem with software patents is not that they grant exclusive use of a particular configuration of bits. That's no different than your Paypal account. Rather, its that its hard to define the scope of the right and easy for people to accidentally and unintentionally infringe.
      - chongli 13y ago
        Not at all. There are lots of inchoate property rights. For example, the right to cut through someone's land. You don't own the land, so the property right is inchoate. Or consider the right to buy or sell another right (an option). Also inchoate, but a property right nonetheless. Indeed, these days, your bank account is an inchoate property right. Just the right to a particular configuration of bits. Right, but you haven't adequately explained why this principle should be extended to intangibles such as ideas. Hence, you have begged the question.
jacquesm 13y ago
Pharma is a very bad example in this context. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening

by eps 13y ago

chongli 13y ago

Always? Seriously? Just like that? Even when a pharma company invests huge sums into R&D of a new drug and relies on patents to try and recoup this money? Yeah, just as drug gangs invest large sums of money to try and expand their turf. The concept of the patent protection is solid. No, it isn't. It has big problems even in the pharma industry, especially as the gold rush on small molecules winds down. Patents are monopolies and monopolies are bad for consumers. The idea that we have to bribe inventors with such a dangerous power ought to be farcical and obviously wrong to most people at this point, yet it continues to be repeated. The other idea that markets will somehow align with the medical needs of the population is also wrong, as evidenced by the failure of health care in the US. If we want important medical research done we ought to do the obvious thing and pay universities and non-profit research labs/hospitals to do it. Hell, we're doing a ton of that already and then selling the patent rights away for pennies on the dollar.

beloch 13y ago
Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk, long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable commercial product. Private enterprise focuses on short-term, low-risk research and engineering, packaging, marketing, etc. to bring safe-bets to market. For every big-pharma dollar spent to produce a new drug, ten government dollars were probably spent to get the underlying science to the point where pharmacorps were willing to touch it, and a hundred dollars more of government funding probably went off on various other tangents that turned out to be dead-ends. On the other hand, academics often suck at commercializing their research. Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. You can't get journal publications out of your twentieth double-blind study looking for side-effects! Big pharma companies do perform a valuable service, but the rewards they receive are out of proportion. Multiple decades of monopoly are an unreasonable reward for performing this last step in development, especially when a lot of drug patents are the result of meaningless changes to existing products that are made solely to restart the monopoly clock! Taking academic research and turning it into a commercial product does take time and money, and without patents this crucial last-step might not be adequately incentivised. However, If corporations want exclusive rights to commercialize publicly funded research, perhaps the public deserves a cut. Perhaps Pfizer, etc. should be on the hook to help fund some of the taxpayer funded research they benefit from. Either that, or some alternative way to fund commercialization of academic research needs to be found.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. This sounds like an excellent argument for doing away with medical patents and replacing them with financial incentives (like a percentage of revenue tax on anyone who sells the new drug for a few years) with proceeds going to whoever paid for the clinical trials.
rayiner 13y ago
I have to be persnickety about this. A patent is a monopoly in the same way all property rights are monopolies: you get the exclusive right to use something. That's different from an economic monopoly on say a particular market. Now, one can lead to the other. If you own all the land around say a train station, you can leverage that into a monopoly on retail for travelers. But that incidental to the fact that a property right in land is a monopoly. As for the pharma industry in the US it's been tremendously successful. The US leads the world in medical technology. The flaws of our healthcare system are an access problem and a distribution problem.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  >A patent is a monopoly in the same way all property rights are monopolies: you get the exclusive right to use something. If you wrap ideas and physical objects up in a box called "something," you've begged the question.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Not at all. There are lots of inchoate property rights. For example, the right to cut through someone's land. You don't own the land, so the property right is inchoate. Or consider the right to buy or sell another right (an option). Also inchoate, but a property right nonetheless. Indeed, these days, your bank account is an inchoate property right. Just the right to a particular configuration of bits. The problem with software patents is not that they grant exclusive use of a particular configuration of bits. That's no different than your Paypal account. Rather, its that its hard to define the scope of the right and easy for people to accidentally and unintentionally infringe.
    - chongli 13y ago
      Not at all. There are lots of inchoate property rights. For example, the right to cut through someone's land. You don't own the land, so the property right is inchoate. Or consider the right to buy or sell another right (an option). Also inchoate, but a property right nonetheless. Indeed, these days, your bank account is an inchoate property right. Just the right to a particular configuration of bits. Right, but you haven't adequately explained why this principle should be extended to intangibles such as ideas. Hence, you have begged the question.

jacquesm 13y ago

Pharma is a very bad example in this context. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening