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What about pharmaceuticals? These are a major arena of patents, where the R&D is measured in the billions of dollars per drug with massive profit margins on suc
by smeyer 11y ago
What about pharmaceuticals? These are a major arena of patents, where the R&D is measured in the billions of dollars per drug with massive profit margins on successful drugs and tiny profit margins on generics once the patents have expired. What do you think the best alternative is to patents? Government-sponsored research (which already contributes a lot to pharmaceuticals by paying for low level research) or something else?
- sitkack 11y agoYou were just presented with a case where nothing was invented, a drug was simply looked up in a commonly known ancient text. Colgate owes India damages.
- smeyer 11y agoYou're right, that's the sort of thing that seems to deserve neither a patent nor any other sort of monopoly. But my question is about the many billions of dollars spent on other sorts of pharmaceutical development. Or is your argument that cases like this one outweigh the benefits derived from drug development in cases where it requires genuine, prolonged, and expensive research effort?
- sitkack 11y agoI think corporate drug research is a flawed development model. It have varying amounts of immoral, amoral and antimoral. To have a _monopoly_ on life saving cures doesn't make sense. Esp how we have seen drug patents wielded against countries with no ability to pay otherwise, for markets that were and will not ever be available to those pharmaceuticals. Drug research should be publicly funded and the results given away to all. Not just because it the right thing to do, but because it is the most efficient.
- math 11y agoYes, I think there would be some system of government sponsorship that would more efficiently deliver the same benefits to society. On the other hand, you can probably rely on governments to screw it up, and it's a tricky issue so I'm open to changing my mind (on extremely high cost to develop patents only).
- ken47 11y agoGovernment-sponsored research would eliminate the perverse incentives of patent-based research, and the fight against disease is absolutely a concern of the public sector.