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This is a seriously specious line of reasoning. Your example is both inaccurate in critical details: - you require me to coerce Joe into coming to touch me -

by frig 17y ago

This is a seriously specious line of reasoning. Your example is both inaccurate in critical details: - you require me to coerce Joe into coming to touch me - I only require Joe not prevent me from using my own pharma lab and my own materials to cook up my own batch of S ...which is why I won't even answer your question; it's irrelevant to the situation at hand (changing essential details to get the outcome you want is silly). You're also treating Joe like he's stupid, which is not very likely if he's inventing substance S (you and I may be idiots; Joe is smart with a capital S); given that Joe's a smart cookie it's a safe assumption that Joe is well aware that he's deciding to spend 10 years developing a new technique that can be easily replicated as soon as he invents it. He's aware of the possibility for (ii) the entire time we're negotiating (i); failing to arrive at a mutually-agreeable arrangement as per (i) (eg something close to cost-of-manufacture; it's not like I can beat that price myself, right?) is a calculated risk on his part, which doesn't always work out in his favor. There're obvious consequences for (ii) -- among which is Joe no longer deciding to invent substance T -- but those are consequences one can opt for, in precisely the same way that Joe's inflexibility (unwilling to compromise far enough on (i)) has unwanted consequences for Joe (prompting me to pick option (ii)) that he has opted for. Which in general is the flipside of the "patent-ignoring nations undercut incentive to innovate, making future drugs unlikely to be invented" argument: pharma companies have been extremely well aware in general of eg the situation in india and more generally the sentiment that if push comes to shove (poverty, epidemic, etc.) the right thing to do is ignore patent and manufacture; in the same way that the consequences of ignoring patents are obvious so too is it obvious that driving too hard a bargain for too long will undermine the ability to drive future bargains at all, b/c sooner or later circumstances change and your not-really customers say "fuck it". EG: it would've been prudent in the long-term for pharmacompanies to push for a standardized international regime for temporary patent abatement (due to epidemic or poverty, etc.) that (presumbably) would have some sliding scale (dire emergencies and abject poverty == SELL AT COST, less so @ the less extreme) and (for example) some notion of compensatory patent extension (eg an extension for 2 years + 2x the duration of the abatement period); such an arrangement wouldn't be ideal, but by proactively crafting a better-than-today, even-if-not-really-good-enough compromise they could've nipped the larger issue (countries going "rogue") mostly in the bud.

anamax 17y ago
Yes, my example is different. I'm using that difference to demonstrate that your argument fails. You acknowledge that Joe doesn't owe you his touch on the basis that he isn't required to put out any effort to save you. My point is that you're distinguishing between effort at different times. You think that should be able to benefit from work that he does before you have a need but not from work that he does after you find yourself in need. That's absurd. Yes, I know that the mechanism by which Joe withholds his labor is different in the two cases. So what? The whole "there's no marginal cost" argument is silly. We pay programmers more than ditch diggers even though it's clear that the latter work much harder than the former. As to the "prudent" argument, pharma companies don't control IP law. The actual argument boils down to "they should have tried to molify righteous thugs". (Yup, I think that taking someone's labor is thuggery.)
- frig 17y ago
  LOL we will not agree; if your internal theories don't allow for making different decisions at different times we don't have much to talk about.
- frig 17y ago
  More to the point (for the peanut gallery): I'll use anamax's verbiage throughout, despite the general silliness of his rhetorical framing. Firstly: the notion that there's something absurd in my being able to profit from work some pharma research did in an earlier era is itself absurd; if you really believe that under no circumstance is that warranted, you wind either being against patent expiry at all (b/c why would it suddenly become ok just b/c some years have passed) -- which is a tenable but very minority position -- or you have to concede that there's no general principle against such situations, at which point we can get to arguing details. That's why it's LOL-worthy; it's already the case that it's totally fine to "profit" from work done earlier without compensating the person who did it, provided that the work was done sufficiently long ago (so as to have fallen out of whatever ip bracket it fell into)...which means the argument-from-principles is just ignorant, and the real argument is "do you consider exigent circumstances to also justify such "profiting" from previously-performed labor in the same way that "the passage of time" justifies the same, or not. Reasonable people can disagree on the latter topic; arguing that my argument somehow fails because it violates a principle that is also violated by all the world's systems of intellectual property is a position you can take, at the expense of revealing yourself to be holding a position contrary to pretty much all the serious thought on IP in general. But let's move along. The notion of "withholding his labor" is manifestly silly: he created knowledge, knowledge is not excludable once distributed, so there's no intrinsic ability to "deny" future-time use of already-produced-and-distributed-knowledge...whatever ability Joe has to "deny his labor" in this specific case is a gift from those he would deny it to. This makes the programmers-versus-ditch-diggers a red herring: programmers get paid what they do because they can deny their labor if they're not paid a satisfactory wage (they stop working, it's that easy); a knowledge-producer can't deny use of already-distributed knowledge in anything like the same way, and depends on the state's willingness to enforce certain rules for what capacity to "deny labor" that way. Which of course means that yes it is imprudent not to mollify righteous thugs in other nations; those righteous thugs are the means by which a pharma company would be "denying its labor" in that nation, and failing to strike a mutually-agreeable bargain leaves you unlikely to be able to do any denying, at all. That's reality and that's the scope of options within pharmas operate (and indeed they know this probably better than you and have made their choices, etc.); you are free to dislike it and find it unpleasing -- perhaps curse fate for not evolving a cerebral cortex with a functioning drm system -- but making choices based on the actual nature of reality is probably the only way to make good choices short of luck.

by frig 17y ago

anamax 17y ago

Yes, my example is different. I'm using that difference to demonstrate that your argument fails. You acknowledge that Joe doesn't owe you his touch on the basis that he isn't required to put out any effort to save you. My point is that you're distinguishing between effort at different times. You think that should be able to benefit from work that he does before you have a need but not from work that he does after you find yourself in need. That's absurd. Yes, I know that the mechanism by which Joe withholds his labor is different in the two cases. So what? The whole "there's no marginal cost" argument is silly. We pay programmers more than ditch diggers even though it's clear that the latter work much harder than the former. As to the "prudent" argument, pharma companies don't control IP law. The actual argument boils down to "they should have tried to molify righteous thugs". (Yup, I think that taking someone's labor is thuggery.)

frig 17y ago
LOL we will not agree; if your internal theories don't allow for making different decisions at different times we don't have much to talk about.
frig 17y ago
More to the point (for the peanut gallery): I'll use anamax's verbiage throughout, despite the general silliness of his rhetorical framing. Firstly: the notion that there's something absurd in my being able to profit from work some pharma research did in an earlier era is itself absurd; if you really believe that under no circumstance is that warranted, you wind either being against patent expiry at all (b/c why would it suddenly become ok just b/c some years have passed) -- which is a tenable but very minority position -- or you have to concede that there's no general principle against such situations, at which point we can get to arguing details. That's why it's LOL-worthy; it's already the case that it's totally fine to "profit" from work done earlier without compensating the person who did it, provided that the work was done sufficiently long ago (so as to have fallen out of whatever ip bracket it fell into)...which means the argument-from-principles is just ignorant, and the real argument is "do you consider exigent circumstances to also justify such "profiting" from previously-performed labor in the same way that "the passage of time" justifies the same, or not. Reasonable people can disagree on the latter topic; arguing that my argument somehow fails because it violates a principle that is also violated by all the world's systems of intellectual property is a position you can take, at the expense of revealing yourself to be holding a position contrary to pretty much all the serious thought on IP in general. But let's move along. The notion of "withholding his labor" is manifestly silly: he created knowledge, knowledge is not excludable once distributed, so there's no intrinsic ability to "deny" future-time use of already-produced-and-distributed-knowledge...whatever ability Joe has to "deny his labor" in this specific case is a gift from those he would deny it to. This makes the programmers-versus-ditch-diggers a red herring: programmers get paid what they do because they can deny their labor if they're not paid a satisfactory wage (they stop working, it's that easy); a knowledge-producer can't deny use of already-distributed knowledge in anything like the same way, and depends on the state's willingness to enforce certain rules for what capacity to "deny labor" that way. Which of course means that yes it is imprudent not to mollify righteous thugs in other nations; those righteous thugs are the means by which a pharma company would be "denying its labor" in that nation, and failing to strike a mutually-agreeable bargain leaves you unlikely to be able to do any denying, at all. That's reality and that's the scope of options within pharmas operate (and indeed they know this probably better than you and have made their choices, etc.); you are free to dislike it and find it unpleasing -- perhaps curse fate for not evolving a cerebral cortex with a functioning drm system -- but making choices based on the actual nature of reality is probably the only way to make good choices short of luck.