Slashdot Mirror

Here's a proposed "alternative to pharmaceutical patents".

That proposed alternative boils down to "the government should pay for all of the research necessary - after all, the government (here in Europe) already pays through universal health care, and look at all the great drugs".

Problem is, it neglects to realize the number of drugs invented in the US as opposed to Europe. Most of them are invented here. So unless you're suggesting that the US government not only provide universal health care, but also pay significantly higher rates than Europe does, the amount of drug research worldwide would decline. A lot.

in some industries it may take much longer than 5 years to research and develop the idea - pharmaceuticals take 10-15 years to go from lab to market, due to all the human trials they have to run. The patent would be expired before the thing even got off the bench in a 5 year term...

I think that's pretty easy to remedy, have the patent term start when a drug is released. Oh, and since you brought up pharmaceuticals do you know that "Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development"? Here's a proposed "alternative to pharmaceutical patents".

Falcon

There is even a web page in english, where people can report what they give. Near the bottom of the page is a list of articles from around the world about this. There has even been written a tribute song to him after his testimony, which Wired covered here.

And this court case has really helped the Pirate Party of Sweden. During the last week they have gotten over 1000 new members, which makes them the second-largest opposition party (in member count) in Sweden. Their youth organisation has also grown to become the second-largest political youth organization in Sewden.

To prevent draconian laws being passed, the Pirate Party should raise awareness of this.

While they got a lot of attention some time ago, nowadays they aren't heard of too often. So, Pirats, get off you behinds and lobby!

I'm Swedish and a member of Piratpartiet (The Pirate Party) since the first day it was announced. I have of course been following this sitcom with great interest, but I'm still not sure which outcome is better for the future in a bigger perspective.

The prosecutors play this case so utterly unprofessional that I'm starting to think that they WANT to lose, but make it look like they tried to win. The reason for this is simple. If they lose, they will use this as "evidence" that Sweden need a whole bunch of new draconian surveillence laws and increase the scope of liability for copyright infringements which will kill the internet as we know it.

In a way I want TPB to lose. That will shut up the law mongerers because it will show that current laws are good enough. It will also make them martyrs and will 100-up the public support for the ongoing pirate movement (which actually is very little about filesharing and mostly about the right to privacy, anonymity, freedom of speech and uncensored exchange of information).

They way I see it, the only realistic way to really make a change it steering society away from 1984, which is the direction it's heading in right now, is to vote the Pirate Party into the EU parliament, where they will be able to make a lot of noise where it counts. Only 3 months left to the election...

While I agree with you that here in the US with Obama appointing people to the peak of law enforcement we're in a bad way, this trial isn't in the US. It's in Sweden. Different strokes for different folks.

The Pirate party is actually a political force in Sweden. In particular the salient points of their platform were adopted by several political parties in the last election due to a groundswell of support. We could learn from them. They're in no danger.

Now I've posted enough on-topic stuff. Let's have an excerpt from TFA:

Sony complained in court that The Pirate Bay never remove torrents on copyright holders request, but that they have the ability to do so since they remove torrents that are named in a way that doesn't reflect the material they link to. They note that The Pirate Bay has a bad attitude to complaints and ridicules the complainer.

Aw... the pirate bay makes fun of takedown requests and that makes Sony sad. I think there's something in my eye.

To add to this, we have:

The "official" site for the trial, somewhat slow at the moment

Twitter feed with related posts

The pirate party's coverage

The trial is covered live with audio from swedish television and radio (in Swedish though), these and other ways to follow the trial can be found in the URL's above.

Nice troll, if you bothered reading any of the information available on the party website you'd know the answer.

/Mikael

/Mikael

This happened to Piratpartiet in Sweden some time before the last election, but not for the kiddie-porn filter, but for some major blacklister that a lot of companies use to filter out gambling and porn.

This is where we have located the servers of the Swedish Pirate Party.

Part of the reason is that the ISP Bahnhof has taken at stance on privacy issues that we are very happy with as pirates. But of course part of the reason is that it's a pretty cool looking data center. :)

You can find a couple of pictures from when we installed our servers in the data center here.

/Christian Engstrom
Vice Chairman, The Pirate Party, Sweden

*Note: On Slashdot you often see the statement that patents are a state sanctioned monopoly.

It's not just /.ers who call patents monopolies, economists and politicians do too. Monopolies: "Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service". Patents give the owner exclusive control of the invention. "Economists, beginning with Adam Smith - a friend and teacher of James Watt - have carefully documented the problems of monopoly." This is about a patent. "The Patent Controversy in the XIXth Century" [doc]: "Whether justice required that society reward an inventor for his services; if so, was a patent (i.e. a temporary monopoly) the fairest means of reward?" From Findlaw: "What Do You Have When You Have a Patent and Is There Any Risk?"
"If granted, a patent gives you a 20-year monopoly on selling, using, making or importing the invention into the United States. Your patent gives you the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention in the United States."

Falcon

The US pirate party's website is at http://www.pirate-party.us/
(an AC posted an incorrect link, hmm... malice vs. incompetence... it was only missing a hyphen...)

The original swedish pirate party is at http://piratpartiet.se/

[The Pirate Party] were almost ignored at the polls last time

Not very true. It's true that they only got 0,63%, or 34918 of the votes, but that's a HUGE accomplishment for a party that had at the time only existed for a few months and had a budget of practically zero.

I personally know a significant amount of people who considered voting for them but in the end decided to vote for an established party because they still believed that the liberals would practice liberalism and that a vote on the Pirates would be a somewhat wasted vote. Now, after the FRA law has been voted through, by those who call themselves liberals, there are A LOT of people in Sweden who feel politically homeless. Considering that the surveillance craze was initiated by the social democrats before the last election, they aren't an option either.

Next year there is the EU election. The Pirate Party have a great chance to get actual seats in the European parliament. One reason is that there are usually much less voters in that election, and people don't vote there for things like "cheaper kindergartens" and "to save the local hospital". Combine this with the ongoing FRA uproar, that the Pirate party has a little money for campaign this time and that you only need 2% of the votes to get a seat and it's easy to see that a vote on the Pirates is anything but wasted.

If the Pirate Party get a seat in EU 2009 there will be a lot of attention, and this will help getting seats in the Swedish government in the 2010 election easier.

One more thing: The tone about the Pirate Party in media has been very different the last few months. We aren't seen as the just "the rebelling kids" or troublemakers (the negative meaning of it) anymore, but as a political phenomenon which is a bit of fresh air and is to be taken seriously.

If you want to help make this become reality, please consider donating some money! Every donation is welcome!

It is so refreshing to see a political party focused on electronic freedom and sane intellectual property laws.

Help the Pirate Party fight this and other crazy technology laws by donating

It is so refreshing to see a political party focused on electronic freedom and sane intellectual property laws.

Help the Pirate Party fight this and other crazy technology laws by donating

First disallow software patents, software is already protected by copyright.

I'd take it further. Disallow patents (ie. interference by the government in the citizen's business) for all areas where it cannot be scientifically justified that patents are a clear net win for society. In other words the onus is on the patent office to justify their costly existence, not on us to justify that they shouldn't.

I don't know whether patents are needed or not but that's why I came up with my proposal. Adam Smith called them a necessary evil.

Have patent times varying by field, again scientifically justified. e.g. if we have pharmacy patents at all it might be justified having the time length extended by the length of testing.

"Drug industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing than on research and development". "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents". Also pharmaceutical companies don't do all the research, for instance the NCI, National Cancer Institute spent $183 million to develop Taxol, a drug for cancer chemotherapy, then sold all the "rights" to use the testing data to Bristol-Myers Sqibb for $43 million. This was in the late 1980s, by 2000 it was estimated BMS made $1 billion a year by 2000 on Taxol sales.

After that if the patent holder wants to keep the patent then require them to pay a royalty, the first five year extension would cost say 5% of the average of revenue the product had generated the first five years.

Too easily gamed. Form two companies. One sells the product with the patented technology at minimal cost to the second company. Use structural impediments to make sure nobody else will buy it. Second company makes all the profits.

That's Hollywood accounting. Simply require anyone who can afford it to be able to buy whatever it is to be able to buy it from the manufacturer.

Another way to reform the patent system is to require patent holders to release a product utilizing the patents within a couple of years of the issue of them.

Too easily gamed. Sell a hand made, useless product at a ruinous cost that nobody in their right mind would buy. Keep patents on the shelf indefinitely doing that.

If a corporation does that it's liable to be sued by stockholders, aren't some Yahoo! shareholders suing or threaten to sue Yahoo! for it's refusal to accept MS's offer? Maybe what you're meant was that one company sets up another one to manufacture a product who then sells it exclusively the the first one. Simply make that illegal. What I said about Hollywood accounting above addresses it as well.

Reading the rest it appears you oppose patents "entire patent edifice". To a degree I am too, for instance I don't like the thought one person can be prevented from selling something they came up with independently but someone else received a patent on it first, however companies and people have to have a reason to spend the tyme and money to invent something. As Adam Smith said patents are a necessary evil.

Falcon

If you had followed this proposal for the last few years (it is old, being proposed again and again), you would know that both the left and the right support it.

The only party that is clearly against this proposal is a relatively new party that refuses to place themselves on the right/left scale in politics: The Pirate Party.

And no, it is not because they think this could be used against piracy. It it because the first and most important item on they political agenda is the protection of personal integrity, like the right to privacy and the right to free speech.

FRA has apparently stated that they had already been using wiretaps. I think some posts in the thread mention that as well. The swedish environmental party (miljöpartiet) has requested that an investigation should be do to see if FRA has broken the law. Source here (in swedish)
http://www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/riksdagsfraga_fras_laglosa_avlyssning_maste_utredas

If she's from Folkpartiet advice her to join another party preferably a non "Alliansen" party since Folkpartiet is a basically evil.

Now on the subject.
Free file sharing for noncommercial use
Free sampling
Shorter copyright period
Ban DRM
Remove "kassettavgiften"

More info here!
http://www.piratpartiet.se/politik/upphovsratt

n the drugs industry, a poster child for pro-patent arguments, a fixed-term monopoly could be granted by the licensing authority as a quid-pro-quo for getting a new drug proven and certified

Except patents aren't needed for drugs. "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents". As for funding research, pharmaceutical companies spend much more money on marketing than research and development. Then not all research on drugs is done by pharmaceutical companies either. An excellent example is Taxol, a drug for the treatment of some cancers such as breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute, NCI, spent $183,000,000 developing and testing Taxol. After the NCI spent all that taxpayer money it sold all the rights, including the test data needed to get FDA drug approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $43,000,000, $140,000,000 less than taxpayers paid. By 2000, years after BMS bought the rights, it was estimated BMS was making $1,000,000,000 a year on sales of Taxol.

Not if life saving drugs stop being developed, because the pharmaceutical companies spend millions proving a particular chemical is safe and effective and then get massively undercut by a third party manufacturer producing the same chemical via a different process.

It doesn't go like that, pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on research. Not only that but government does a lot of research as well. According to this, "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents", in Europe the bulk of research is paid for by government. Now I don't know if that's true but in the US the federal government pays millions for research as well. An excellent example of this is Taxol. The NCI, National Institute of Cancer, part of the NIH or National Institutes of Health a government agency spend $183 million in taxpayers' money to develop Taxol. What did the NCI do with it? After spending all that money to develop and test the drug as a cancer treatment the NCI "sold", gave it away is more like it, all the data needed to win FDA approval of Taxol as a drug to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $43 million. In other words taxpayers paid more the $140 more than they got. And how much does BMS make selling Taxol? In 2000 BMS made almost $1 billion and they were expected to make more each year thereafter. Now I don't know how many doses are needed for one treatment with Taxol but while BMS has been able to lower the cost of making one dose to under $1 a full treatment costs a few thousand dollars to someone needing it or their insurance.

I suggest you look at the pirate party's position on this issue. It's backed up with actual, like, facts: http://www.piratpartiet.se/an_alternative_to_pharmaceutical_patents

And what's wrong with the the Pirate Party?

It has worked reasonably well in Sweden, where the think-tank The Pirate Bureau formed shortly after the copyright industry had created the Anti-Pirate Bureau, an organisation consisting mostly of lawyers and paid P2P network infiltrators that tries to track down people distributing copyrighted material. The Pirate Bureau became rather well-known and popular, and was often invited to TV debates on copyright law, and interviewed and asked for comments when newspapers published articles about the subject - and were so successful that the copyright lobbyists adopted a policy a few years ago to refuse debates where representatives from the Pirate Bureau were participating. And then there's the Pirate Party, which didn't get enough votes to take seats in the parliament this time but was treated as a serious candidate by most of the media, despite its name.

When someone is calling you names, it's usually a lot more effective to embrace it than to try and distance yourself from it.

The Pirate Party also claims, with good justification (although a bit less of it in English), that patents should be abolished outright. Good to see some others chime in.

it has also been suggested in various swedish blogs that the reason for this could be to label the pirate bay and file sharing in general as a dirty business and to scare people away from it by associating it with child porn. representatives of the danish antipiracy movement has stated that child porn is actually a good tool for fighting piracy (source http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic79221-15-5.aspx# bm79282), if service providers agree to filter child porn and help prosecute those who distribute it (as is the case for most providers in sweden today), it will be a much smaller step to do the same for copyrighted material.

1. Thomas Bodström, who was minister of justice until the election in september 2006, was accused of putting pressure on police and attorneys to act against The Pirate Bay (which is illegal under the Swedish Constitution) after high-ranking employees at his Ministry of Justice had met with representatives for MPAA and the US Department of State. Bodström is now, among other things, the chairman of ECPAT Sweden who together with the IT crime section of the Swedish police compile the list of websites to put in the DNS blacklist discussed in this article. Thomas Bodström is not a fan of The Pirate Bay.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=3969&date=20 060602

2.An anti-copyright website run by some of the same people as the ones who run The Pirate Bay was placed on this list a few weeks ago because the front page had an animation of a naked kid doing the "Copy Me" dance. There was absolutely nothing pornographic about this animation (see for yourself: http://kopimi.se/ ), which the attorney told Stefan Kronqvist, head of the IT crime section of the Swedish police, while they told him to remove the website from the blacklist after the people behind the website had made a formal complaint. They also sent a mail to Kronqvist requesting financial compensation for the time their website had been blocked but received no reply. Rumours say that Stefan Kronqvist is not a fan of The Pirate Bay.
http://swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2007/07/polise ns-hmnd-m.html

3. The US Chamber of Commerce recently arranged a seminar for pro-copyright lobbyists in Sweden with the title "Sweden - a safe haven for pirates?". In this seminar a guy from a Danish anti-piracy organisation explained how great it was to use child pornography as an argument to establish the principle that information carriers like websites and ISPs must be responsible for the information they distribute. Once that principle was established it could easily be extended to cover things like copyright infringement as well. He higly recommended lobbyists in other countries to use the same technique.
http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic79221-15-5.aspx# bm79282

Most of the links are in Swedish, sorry about that.

We fought the censoring of AllOfMP3 and won. We will change this decision as well. Proud to be Swedish! Proud to be a member of http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/

http://www2.piratpartiet.se/wiki/Why_We_Are_Right

Read it, I'll wait.

Back already? Great. There are people who want to abolish copyright outright. I am one of them. Thank you for broadening your perspective.

I'm curious, too. I did some (quick) searching and got this link, which says the number is 15% and links to some financial reports with R&D expenditures, but I don't understand the reports enough to figure out what those expenditures are relative to total or anything.

The logical flaw of your reasoning lies in the fact that

1)your premise isn't substantiated,
2)AND you make a false dillemma out of it (patents and medicne, or no patents and no medicine, as if that were only the two possible options).

Patents are *supposed* to lead to investments. However, in reality patents are more than not used to stiffle innovation. In reality, the huge profits those companies make go primarily into marketing, NOT R&D. And the relatively small investment (compared to the overall profits and what goes to other departemtns like marketing and the legal teams) that remains, is that really the best return one can get? Is that the most efficient (in terms of being beneficial to the populace at large instead of being most beneficial for the monopolist) we can get?

I doubt it. ( http://www2.piratpartiet.se/referenser/the_reform_ of_intellectual_property )

What? Do you think what they said was clearer than what Piratpartiet says? It's copied almost verbatim from Piratpartiet's program.

If a company creates something, they do have a certain right (in the liberal market economic sense) to do whatever the hell they want with it regardless of how poor their business model is. The opining of the Norwegian Pirate Party does not negate this. If you are going to argue that laws to protect copyright are outdated because technology to more easily subvert them has been invented, why not argue that the advent of the firearm should mark the end of murder laws?

There is a subtle difference. Bad business models can't and shouldn't be outlawed, but that doesn't mean there should be laws on the books specifically supporting poor business models.

If I invent wonderful technology that acts as a huge catalytic converter, sucks in smog from cities, processing it into clean air, then putting it back into the atmosphere, should I have the right to require random people from breathing the cleaner air they did not solicit or ask for?

The analogy isn't 100%, of course, and I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of this particular analogy, but my point is that legislation shouldn't be used to prop up poor business models.

When it comes to comparing homicide laws with copyright law -- any law is based on a lot of balances. Will an introduction of a law harm or help society as a whole? Does a law represent the predominant values of those within its jurisdiction? It's clear that laws against murder are a clear benifit to society, irrespective of the fact that killing people, even en masse is technically very easy.

It's not as clear that free distribution of material is harmful in the same way, in fact, we feel that restrictions on redistribution are more harmful to society as a whole than the redistribution itself, which we even feel is benificial.

These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.

There's a big difference between the tangible and the intangible. But please do try to inform yourself better before dismissing pirate idiology as a knee-jerk reaction.

We in the Swedish Pirate Party have a well-defined ideology based on reform of copyrights, patents and privacy. If you take a few minutes to read our declaration of principles (available from this page, look at the bottom of the page for a link to the file), you can see it's not just a loose cloud of concepts, it's in fact a cohesive argument for reform (not abolition) of copyright and patent laws to fit modern society.

And if anything is knee-jerk, it's comparing the Swedish Pirate Party or Norwegian Venstre to communists. The Pirate Party has no specific political direction. I am personally of a similar general conviction of the Norwegian Venstre party -- centre-right. But the leadership of the Pirate Party contains people from all sides of the political spectrum.

(And btw, if you don't like copyright laws, please don't complain the next time someone turns something licensed under the GPL into a closed source product.)

This is a very good point. In fact, Richard M Stallman has approached the Pirate Party with these concerns in the past.

In fact, he will be speaking at Göteborg University in about a month, and will specifically take up what he thinks we're doing wrong. :-)

I don't agree with him on these points, how appealing as they ever seem, though. Basically, he wants to legislate putting source code for proprietary software in escrow, and re

I meant to paste a link into my reply above, but somehow I must have lost it before it got lost. Oops.

Anyway, I suggest you read the Swedish Pirate Party's stance on the position of pharmaceutical patents. It's a much more eloquent document than I could hope to reproduce in a slashdot comment at this hour. :-)

Interestingly enough, this is an almost word-for-word translation of the Swedish Pirate Party's declaration of principles.

The Swedish Pirate Party didn't explicitly permit this copying, except for declaring their pages to be "No Copyright". I guess Venstre practice what they preach, and the Swedish Pirate Party has also come out with a statement saying that they welcome this act of copying. :-)

More information about this (in Swedish) from Piratpartiet can be found here.

Oh, they exist for a reason alright. That's why I oppose 'em! http://piratpartiet.se/

If anybody thinks the use congress will enact anything fair use, they are mistaken.
Even the most fair-use oriented part of congress are with a great margin on the MPAA and RIAA side of things.

Maybe the US needs a pirate party. http://www2.piratpartiet.se/international/english

With the current balance in congress, a few seats may give great influence.

From http://www2.piratpartiet.se/ in my translation:

"The judicial system is make a mistake a see these lobby organisations as some sort of private police corp. Their only interest is to keep their old profitable monopoly. There organisations have nothing to do in our judicial system, says The Pirate Partys partyleader Rickard Falkvinge."

That pretty much sums it up if you ask me.

Yes, it's important. It's one of the paramount issues we face today. Hell, I'd not only support a candidate that talked about privacy (there aren't any in Sweden), I'd even start a new party focused on privacy and the right to a private life.

Oh, wait. I did. And it was reasonably successful too, although the privacy debate is just starting out in Sweden...

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

I'll be happy to.

The Swedish Pirate Party has a proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. The proposed system has the potential to cut the European governments' spending on drugs in half, while still giving more money to pharmaceutical research.

As an extra bonus, we (the developed world) would no longer have to insist that millions of poor people in third world countries die of preventable causes, just to keep the profit margins high enough for the big pharma companies. This is in effect what we're doing today, through the patent system.

Please feel free to have a look at the proposal. Your comments will be welcome.

Christian Engström
Vice chairman, The Pirate Party (Sweden)

This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.

I'll be happy to.

The Swedish Pirate Party has a proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. The proposed system has the potential to cut the European governments' spending on drugs in half, while still giving more money to pharmaceutical research.

As an extra bonus, we (the developed world) would no longer have to insist that millions of poor people in third world countries die of preventable causes, just to keep the profit margins high enough for the big pharma companies. This is in effect what we're doing today, through the patent system.

Please feel free to have a look at the proposal. Your comments will be welcome.

Christian Engström
Vice chairman, The Pirate Party (Sweden)

what do you think the ratio of new drug research is to profits? For a major drug company? Conversely, what do you think the ratio of marketing vs profits? Got a clue? No? Feel free to go do a little googling.

Here are the Financial Highlights from the annual reports of Novartis, Pfizer and AstraZeneca. They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing and profits.

So the standard argument for granting patent monopolies and allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for the patented drugs - that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs - is simply not true.

The organization Doctors Without Borders gives an example of how pharmaceutical patents affect prices i a recent press release:

The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.

To the western world, pharmaceutical patents mean an enormous waste of money. In the third world, it's lives that are wasted instead. It's time to think about an alternative.

And alternatives exist - plenty of them, in fact. Nobel prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz has made one proposal. The Swedish Pirate Party has made another (or essentially the same, actually). Economist Dean Baker has collected four others, that also run along the same lines.

It's time to open up a global discussion about the effects of pharmaceutical patents, and the alternatives. Today's system is not only grossly immoral, it is also expensive and wasteful. It's time for a better way. Pharmaceutical patents kill.

Sorry, I'm used to think the european way. And I think tax payers are far better investors in drug R&D, since they are not after the economical profit, just the new drugs. The case is quite different here in Europe, please take a look at http://www2.piratpartiet.se/an_alternative_to_phar maceutical_patents

For example, in a recent press release they write:

The case of AIDS illustrates the trend. While fierce generic competition has helped prices for first-line AIDS drug regimen to fall by 99% from $10,000 to roughly $130 per patient per year since 2000, prices for second-line drugs - which patients need as resistance develops naturally - remain high due to increased patent barriers in key generics producing countries like India.

The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.

We can look at the numbers for Novartis, Pfizer or AstraZeneca.

They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.

So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.

The Swedish Pirate Party has one proposal for an alternative system. Many others have suggested other alternatives.

But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.

I would much prefer if the swedish Pirate Partyhttp://www2.piratpartiet.se/international/eng lish/ controlled the internet!

You're begging the question of whether or not the very concept of intellectual property, as currently defined, is useful, meaningful, or desirable.

Many people say that it is wrongheaded, poorly defined (if not outright meaningless) and pernicious. If they are right, then what price adherence to this regime? Unless, of course, you feel that the best way of doing away with a broken system is riding it hard until it finally fails; some might say that the current rate of patent lawsuits is doing just that.

Above, someone posted this link: http://www2.piratpartiet.se/wiki/Why_We_Are_Right

It's quite a bit to grasp, although it isn't all that long. But it does illustrate that someone obviously thinks IP is bad stuff, and has some sophisticated reasons for thinking so. If they break current IP laws, presumably they are doing so sincerely, and do not think that the artist should be necessarily compensated for copies, if anything at all. To put it another way, does another album from Britney mean that she deserves big bucks, or a bullet to the brainstem? Or maybe nothing? Maybe she should be paid for her performances and studio time, but after that all bets are off?

In other words, just because someone answers "yes" to all three your questions doesn't mean they even think the questions are meaningful, let alone relevant.

The Swedish Pirate Party recently added the following document to their reading list:

http://www2.piratpartiet.se/wiki/Why_We_Are_Right

It's a sort of summary of many ideas, and picks open the problems of why copyrights and patents don't match reality. Nothing hugely novel there, but all well summarised.

None of it is justified. Some of it might be legally correct under the USA's infofascistic system. Law != Justice. Copyright monopolies should die http://piratpartiet.se/