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Brazil Breaks Patent to Make AIDS Drug
Andy Tai writes: "In this CNN story, Brazil decides to break a patent over an AIDS drug for public benefits. Brazil will produce the drug domestically without agreements with patent holder, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche. Brazil's efforts to fight AIDS have been praised internationally, and it successfully prevented the US Government from bringing complaints in the WTO on behalf of the drugs industry. This may set an important example that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection." There's another article in the Boston Globe about the decision.
There's a time and a place for all this profit-minded patent shite.
AIDS ain't it!
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
How could it be in this day and age that lives are more important than money and intellectual property? I must have not woken up yet, and must still be in a dream world.
Medicine has been corporate property for far too long already.
-- Colin
"This may set an important example that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection"
It sets a few more examples, too. If you're an AIDS patient, it sets the example that you should fly to Brazil, right away. If you're a drug company, the example is to look into carpet bombing Brazil, and if that fails, stop developing drugs no one will ever pay you for.
Just because software patents are patents on math & therefore stupid doesn't mean all patents are stupid. Pharaceutical R&D is intensely expensive. Screwing the companies that fund research is a bad solution to what is at heart a political problem.
you misspelled 'siht' as 'sith'. jedi-freudian slip?
I hope that events such as this one will help some companies realize that there's more to business than just having a good IP portfolio.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
What happened to the drug companies' rights?
If they don't receive royalties on their drugs, how are they going to support ongoing research?? What is Brazil doing to cure AIDS??
It looks like they just want to get something for nothing to me.
Bravo for Brazil! Unfortunately (?) no-one's life is at stake over one-click ordering (or any of the other stupid algorithm and business method patents). It's unlikely this will have any impact on US/European patent law.
I sincerely doubt all the AIDS cases in Brazil were caused by blood transfusion, or passed from mother to child. A high percentage of those infected became that way by choices they made in regard to sexual activity and sharing of needles. In this age of education, AIDS is generally acquired do to ignoring precautions. Ignorance is no answer.
Blar.
I hope the Brazilian government gets bitchslapped by as many international bodies as possible for this. Quite apart from the fact that these drugs aren't designed to be used in the conditions found in Brazil (which will mean that strains of HIV resistant to this treatment will be produced there), they didn't pay for it, so they don't get to have it. Shit, it's not difficult for governments to raise funds for this kind of thing - ever heard of taxes?
Do governments want to pay for medicine to be developed? No.
Do governments want to reap the benefits of that medicine? Hell, yes.
Will this lead to more or less investment by the drug companies in medicines suitable for developing world use? Work it out for yourself.
nal 11
How commendable.
Its quite disgusting that anyone actually patented such a thing in the first place. Human life is sacred and every life is worth more than all of the money in the world.
Then again, given the sick and twisted world of today, it would be quite naive to think that someone WOULDN'T patent such a thing.
Given all the money that is donated into research for medecines into diseases like AIDS, surely any organization that manages to create that medecine has been funded by the donations. Surely noone needs to profit off such a thing.
It's nice to see this patent being disregarded.
Maybe some day, a post like yours would be moderated down for being too damn obvious. Wouldn't that be beautiful? (nothing personal)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
The attitude is correct IMHO. To hell with IP laws when human lifes are in danger. However, knowing Brazil from inside (as a Brazilian), I'd say money will only be shifted from the hands of the lawful IP holder to the hands of a few "selected" companies/people inside the country. Do not be fooled into thinking the people will have cheap access to these medications.
I truly hope I'm wrong.
WTO have already agreed with this politics not only in Brasil, but also in Africa. The problem is that Africans countries have no financial resources to build factories, but if they raise the money they also can break the patent.
WTO agreed with this because here in Brasil drugs AIDS are distributed for free (as beer) by the government, with no costs for carent families.
Brasil (yes, I prefer with the 's') will also export cheaper AIDS drugs to Africa and other poor countries.
Hope this help to end all the pain...
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Finally! hearing news like this is great! sometimes it makes you wonder when people have patenets and jsut worry about moeny and PR, brazil is doing the right thing.
"Damn the man." -Empire Records
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
It is refershing to see that some people still care about people, and not just their security...greed. Props to the Brazilians who are spearheading this affair.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I think it's good to see that there are some governments out there not looking out for corporate interests when it comes to a person's well being. While the Swiss company will probably sue out the wazoo against the government of Brazil for patent infringement, I beleive Brazil in this case has set an excellent precedent regarding patents on medicine that hold the potential to keep someone who is terminally ill from dying.
Brazil has also set many other precedents, including one that US (and the rest of the world) has to yet catch on with - clean emission alcohol powered cars. Unfortunately, because of who we have at 1600 Pennsylvania, I don't expect many of these to be around until after he leaves office.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
So, in another few years, world governments will be able to make whatever they want regardless of patents, while private citizen coders won't be able to write a line of code for fear of tripping over the patents that governments have even less reason than ever to regulate.
Governments and corps in a spat. Oh boy. Whichever way you cut it, the civilians lose.
--G
There are a few reasons this is a bad trend. Now they are using a public health problem as an excuse to void a valid international patent because they did not get the agreement they wanted. This plays very well in the press, "bad evil company would rather see people die than sell their stuff cheaper" instead of saying "country refuses to pay a fair price for drugs to save its own people"
Want a story that is similar, but on a more "person" level. White farmers losing their property in Zimbabwe, because its not fair that they have it.
This is the new trend, government are going to take what they want and justify it in any shape or form. While they start off doing this with the cover of "saving lives" how long before it becomes anything they want?
So here are some of the real problems.
1. Basically Brazil breaks the agreed internation law and makes the stuff for free, thereby forcing other nations to either follow their example of pay the difference. (see South Africa's example - do it or we take your companies assests)
2. Reduces the possibility of region specific drugs NOT being developed because companies rightfully fear losing all investment. (some diseases are more prevalent in certain areas of the world - that is an obvious statement).
3. Raises spectre of loss of intellectual property on other levels, and more and more are confiscated for the "public good"
4. Increases the likelyhood of similar industries leaving "hostile" countries furthering the problem that country faces.
When do we stop? Who can judge what is a fair price for something? Who can judge what can fairly be patented?
Apparently people are willing to allow those with the guns to do it, and not realize its the first step to losing their own rights.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's really easy to fall into the trap of justifying this theft as necessary to save lives, but the pharmaceuticals that worked on these products are now being deprived of money from these countries that would pay for the research that went into the product. Look, the expense of the research and regulatory compliance to create a new drug doesn't go away when the drug comes to market...it sometimes takes years for a pharmaceutical company to actually make a profit. With the actions of countries like Brazil, that payback will now take longer.
I wonder how the looters will get other life-saving wonder-drugs when they've driven the big research companies out of business?
I like the idea of saving people, and it would be hard to sanction or punish Brazil for doing this -- since the rest of the world would boo us off the planet. But this is wrong, people. Hell, in the long run, education will save a lot more people than this drug. This drug will not make Brazillians stop fucking each other or sharing needles or whatever it is that Brazillians do to get AIDS.
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP. This world is going to shit. But that's just MHO.
And to be off topic for a second, those moderators who disagree with me may feel free to moderate me down as a troll for having an opinion (since that's what happened the last time I posted) -- but that won't make me less right. ;)
-Omar
*as in Libertarian free, not social-welfare-state free. >;)
To hell with the drug companies. That's what Brazil said. You know why? They have figured out the drug companies' scheme. Whoever it is that makes these drugs, they're just like all the other companies that make drugs for all the other diseases: rather than make drugs that could cure or prevent HIV, they just make a drug that will let you live with the ailment. Think about it: how many times would you take a vaccine or a cure? Once? For a period of a few weeks? Now think about how many times you take medicine that lets you live another month... you take it all the time, for the rest of your life! So basically they're acting just like a bunch of drug dealers. How does a drug dealer make money? On the come-back.
So Brazil realized that like a bunch of heartless gangsters the drug companies' are selling these high priced HIV pills to dying people so that they can live to pay another drug bill. However in this case, it was Brazil that was footing the bill, so they said to hell with it, we're making our own damn drugs. Well, way to go Brazil! I hope other countries wake up and take similar action.
~ now you know
Congratulations Brazil. Your government, and people should be given a great thanks from the rest of us - YOU have finally started standing up to these capitalist whores.
Come to Washington, D.C., Sept. 28th, to Demand that the Governments of the rest of the planet start ruling on behalf of their citizens as well.
Bravo Brazil!
And before you say "to help sick people", let me ask this: how many people do you think would donate money to pharmaceutical companies for research? Many people think they are just greedy evil companies out to steal money from poor sick people.
While I hate to side with the large drug companies on such a sensitive issue:
It is a fact of life that if the drug companies do not get paid for their R&D, then they will not bother to produce new drugs for combating AIDS and similar diseases.
As proof of this, consider how many new Malaria drugs are produced? Basically, there is no profit in R&D for malaria, so drug companies simply don't bother.
So, in the short-term this may seem like a good idea, but in the long term it could do serious damage to the search for an AIDS cure.
> Things shape up on the "our money vs. their life" front.
> Medicine has been corporate property for far too long already.
This is a wonderfully idealistic view of the world, but woefully out of touch with reality. Pharmacueticals are incredibly expensive to develop. If other countries follow Brazil, then you're cutting the financial backing for R&D. Say good-bye to most any hope for an AIDS cure, to mention nothing of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and a good number of other diseases. Sure, government-funded research will continue, but by destroying a pharmacuetical company's R&D budget, you'll be drastically slowing down the rate of medical innovation.
If countries truly care about fostering medical innovation AND providing care to those who need it, they would subsidize the cost of prescription medicines. Pharmaceutical companies would be able to recoup their huge R&D investments and patients would have access to low-cost medicine. But this would likely require raising taxes... and that's a whole other topic of discussion.
Really are the scum of the universe.
This is the kind of information that should be free. What if someone were to decide to patent the AIDS bug ? If you were to be infected with it, could you be charged for violating their IP and therefore have no alternative but to buy the cure off them ?
Maybe this is a viable business plan that I should attempt !
i think more countries should follow suite. i'm really getting sick of commercialism when it's placed before human rights.
This was predicted several months ago in the pharmaceutical industry. They are even MORE concerned about this happening in countries in Africa. The countries that have the highest rates of AIDS will likely start manufacturing and distributing drugs to not only people in their own country but to other countries as well.
I doubt that it will hurt their profits in the short term because they don't sell huge amounts of the drugs in the poorer countries anyway, but it sets a (dangerous) precedent for other countries to follow. The point that some people seem to miss is that if they fail to adequately QA the drugs, most of the people will die anyway. Making drugs is not as simple as getting a formula and mixing up the igredients. This is not baking cookies.
The Brazilian government needs to look at addressing problem by preventing new cases of HIV also. They need to promote safe sex and maybe start distributing condoms and disposable syringes or something.
Either way, this is a sad situation.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
This must be the biggest nation-scale "fuck you" to another big entity (without a war) I've seen in a long time...
"...important example that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection."
If patents can't be enforced we will not see much more research&development for deceases.
Do you have any idea at all what the development costs are for this kind of medicines?
Patents as a concept is very important for all economies all over the world and should not be confused with the abuse of patents in the US where to broad and/or to obvious patents are granted.
On the other hand, developing a new drug costs extraordinary amounts of money, the companies who are in the business of making them deserve their reward, too. Someone needs to pay the bill, it's not entirely fair to stick these companies with it. After all, the work they do there is very valuable. There is also the danger, that that loss of profits would decrease the effort which goes into AIDS research.
It would be nice if some developed countries would be prepared to finance part of the drug costs - obviously the pharmaceutical companies would have to be expected to be reasonable in their demands, too.
Given that some people who need to be on Prozac may not be able to remember to take the drug every day (at least initially) it seeems immoral for the company to delay the introduction of Prozac Weekly until the original patent expires, this may have actually harmed people!
Drug companies should have an opportunity to recoup the cost of research, but the cost of this opportunity should not be the health of patients.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Well, that's probably going to be it as far as new drugs in the fight against AIDS. Drugs cost millions (billions?) to develop and test and distribute. If other companies are going to allow these patents to be violated, there's virtually no incentive for drug companies to develop any new drugs to fight AIDS. So yeah, Brazil and other countries who adopt this tactic may get some short term gains, but long term, it's going to kill AIDS patients. Literally.
Did you know that the reason Brasil has one of the highest AIDS infrction rates that it is one of the most promiscuous countries on the face of the earth? Its bullshit that the government is foorting the bill for the people irresposnsible actions. Except in a few rare cases (blood transfusions, medical accidents) 99% of all HIV cases got that way from their own personal actions. No freaking way should the taxpayers have to pay for that. Those responsible should foot that bill,and if they can't foot it, let them die.
Break all this patent crap, this is for the good of everyone, finally a government thats acting sensible. I can understand people or companies want to get credited for the work they did but this shouldnt be taken too far.
It might be an idea to have the United Nations give the company (that holds the patents) large sums of money in order to stimulate further research in the field. That way they'll be happier too.
Now all we have to wait for is a government that states Shell (or whowuzzit) can shove those patents for the water powered engine up their **** because they're going to ignore them anyway.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
According to the article, the motivation for breaking the patent is to save the government money (40% of $82 million) and not necessarily to save lives. The government was getting all the medication it needed, but wanted to pay a lower price.
In Brazil, the government provides free treatment for AIDS/HIV infected people.
I think that this sets a bad precedent and should not be applauded. I see it the same as the government seizing the property (Intellectual Property in this case) of a Corporation for what they claim is a public benefit.
They could seize the property of any company or individual and say that it would be in the public's interest because it saved them some money or because the individual or company did not do what the dgovernment wanted them to do.
This is the way that dictatorships starts and individuals and corporations lose their rights: with the government abusing their police power and the citizens supporting it because it helps their pocketbook.
This sets a very unhealthy (no pun intended) precedent for Drug companies. If this is not met with swift legal action, this will not stop with Brazil.
I can see this as being very difficult to persue, with the US dropping its suit with the WTO and the UN praising Brazil for its "Free Drug" policy.
I guess one thing is for sure, it sure does suck to be Roche right now.
-- Dan
I wonder what would have happened in the 14th - 15th century if some had a cure for the black death, but wanted insane amounts of money to even talk about it. They would have probably tortured it out of them. Pharmacutical companies should consider themselves lucky....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
But why the hell was my story abotu the new Code Red Mountain Dew slurpies at 7-11 rejected?? they rule!!
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
Sorry, I meant 'They're' not 'Their'. But was that a reason to mod me down to troll? Damn homo grammar-nazi mods....
saru mo ki kara ochiru
Hi Everybody..
IMHO patents on medicine should generally be forbidden. I am of the opinion that human life should be protected by all means possible and it is no moral justification that companys make more money on the cost of patenting (and by doing so killing) people.
Of course the pharma producers must earn money, but to withhold vital medicine from dying people because of money is sick.
go on Brazil... hopefully other countrys will follow.!
".Sig Stealer" was here
The fact is that people that have AIDS have it as a result of immoral behaviour. The progression and impact of such diseases is a form of natural selection. Natural selection has moved beyond fitness/strength. We are now in the realms of a natural selection based on intellect and morality. If you lead a moral life and do not abuse your God given body and mind, then you have nothing to fear. Simply avoid drugs, gay sex and others that participate in such activities. We will inherit the Earth.
Many of you may feel that Brazil is doing the right thing here, and I must admit to a certain satisfaction as well, but there is more to this issue than "life is sacred, you can't put a price on it, etc.." These companies spend BILLIONS developing these drugs. What fuels this research? PROFIT. Helping people is great, but these companies are in BUSINESS. If governments simply start TAKING them, then what is the incentive to research new drugs? Don't discount the importance of this decision; if other countries try to follow Brazil's lead with this, you WILL see a reduction in new developments in private AIDS research. This already happened with malaria drug research, so there is a precedent. Personally, I hope the WTO comes down on Brazil like the Wrath of God, to discourage other countries from attempting this. This kind of short-sighted move is the kind of thing that critically slows down drug research. Like most of you, I beleive protecting it's people is the most important goal for a government.. but with millions dying anually fron this disease, can we afford to delay a cure? Capitalism is a dirty business, but it's the reality of the world we live in.
Doesn't Brazil have a high AIDS rate because the men are too macho to use condoms and the women won't insist on it? I think if they can change that, they have a shot at containing the problem which would make AIDS drugs that much more effective... Otherwise it's like trying to use water to put out a fire while someone else is pouring gasoline on it or something.
[o]_O
After reading a few posts stating that there's the danger of such actions disencouraging research, I would like to add:
- The law says that the gov't can issue a compulsory license, which doesn't mean public domain or copying the process for free, but gives the power to the state to set the terms of the license. This is consistent with a constitutional principle that public (not gov't!) weel-being is more important than the weel-being of a few individuals.
- The law also sets a period after which this compulsory licensing can be done. I'm not sure whether it's 2 or 3 years, but should aloow for a reasonable pay-bak period.
- According to the Boston Globe article, a ptient in Brazil costs US$ 350.00, while the same tratment costs US$ 10,000.00 in the US. Clearly, there's plenty of margin for cutting.
Other few points people maybe should be aware of:
- Health Minister José Serra most definitely has an eye in next year presidential elections.
- It is illegal for individuals and private companies in Brazil to trade AIDS medicine, except for selling to the gov't. My brother died of AIDS in 97 and my mother ended up with a big supplt of DDI, which she returned to the health service. She would have done that anyway, but imagine the kind of abuse that would take place if you could obtain medication for free and trade it.
Concept: I see a capsule, that if broken open or exposed to air, would chemically change the contents. Is it possible ? I have no idea. Will the Pharmaceutical Companies look ? That's a sucker bet: they're probably ALREADY looking at it. . .
Nice job, Brazil. You may have won this battle, but you just lost the war. . .
This is all well and good, but before we start heralding this great advance against capitalist pigs we need to watch out. I think decision displays the best of intentions. But what does this mean for future advances in medications for crippling diseases? Those diseases and medications cost INCREDIBLE amounts of money to research. What happens if a company fears that it cannot recoup the money invested in R&D? No more research on these diseases. Longer R&D cycles. Less efficiency. Less incentive. No more new helpful medications. It's a hard decision. Do you want relief immediately, or more effective relief later? Do the ends justify the means? I don't know. But I don't want a stagnation in medical advances because everyone starts to decide they can ignore patents.
Sure, what Brazil is doing sounds like a great and humane thing to do for all those suffering from AIDS without enough money to pay for drug treatment, but consider what the long-term effects of this are. If you eliminate the profit of selling the AIDS drugs, then the companies that spend millions and millions of dollars on research and development will stop doing it.
Where do you think they're going to get the money to research a cure or a vaccine if they can't sell what they've got now?
This may be great for the people currently suffering from AIDS in Brazil, but it's a tragedy for those who will suffer in the future and across the whole world if the money they're leaching might have contributed to a cure or a vaccine.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
Sweden is one example of a country who tried to screw companies (with lontagarfonder and other un-honest criminal shit pulled off by the government), look where it got it. One massive, huge financial meltdown in the early 90's making each Swede with a debt of about $15 000.
The primary reason was that the companies (and their money) fleed the coounty) and not much taxes where payed anymore
You are ALWAYS held resonsible for what you do sooner or later. Sure it way seem to be good to take other peoples huge investment and give it away without paying for it right now but not many new investments will be made. That means no new solutions to cancer, parkinson and other deceases.
Lower your prices, or we'll use 10% of our AIDS budget to send people to your country and have sex with your people. Hehe
I agree with Brazil in this matter, people are dieing due to a patent on a daily basis, this is a clear cut case where a patent violation is in the sake of humanitarianism.
The problem here though is this: patents exist for a reason, and it's not necessarily to let patent holders get fat pockets and laugh their way to the bank at the misfortune of the poor schmoes who have to shell out for the patented product. Especially given pharmaceuticals, the reality is (I've been an IT guy in pharmaceuticals since I was 18, and my mother has been a scientist working for them since she graduated college) that developing drugs for use in humans costs billions of dollars. I'm not exaggerating, billions, even if you only wanted to get a different kind of sugar pill approved, billions. The studies take many years, the insurance costs once you enter the clinical phase (testing the drug in actual humans) are amazing, there are hundreds of people working on the target drug the whole time, and these are people who make $50,000 for the simplest tasks, let alone when you get a pathologist, who may well make several million a year (pathologists are to doctors what doctors are to us, the go to school for twice as long. It was discovered that one of the pathologists at my company made more than one of the executive board). There is not a company in the world that has the capacity to fork out billions of dollars in research for a drug, then sell it at cost, or slightly above cost. They need to make up this capital, as the drug industry is like a loaded version of Vegas... more likely than not, you're going to get burned, except that the issue here is the continuation of your company, and jobs for all of its employees.
If we go willy-nilly violating patents on drugs, companies will stop researching drugs, as they are guaranteed to take a bath if they cannot control the market early on. The people who produce drugs outside of the people who research that drug have comparably next to zero cost in the production, they operate with out overhead, and as a matter of fact, the percentage pure profit on generic drugs (when compared to total sales of a drug by the pharmaceutical who researched it) is tremendously greater.
If you take away a company's ability to control their product after so much initial overhead, they won't do it, because in the end, regardless of any humanitarian mission statement, companies are there for one reason... to bring profit to their stockholders. If the stockholders are not getting a profit, they'll sell, and the company will go under, and now there's no AIDS drug at all, instead of an expensive one (assuming that the company closed prior to research completion). You can't create a company with the expectation to lose money like that, you simply won't get investors.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
if people circumvent the intellectual property rights of drug companies, the result is less money for research, less new drugs, and ultimately less lives saved.
If we respect the intellectual property rights of Big Pharma, the result will be huge dividends for their shareholders and the deaths of many innocent people who just could not afford to stay alive...
Naturally the rights of the shareholders to expect a good return on investment must trump the rights of the impoverished...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
South Africa did the same thing in the early '90s and got their asses embargoed by the wonderful U.S. of A. In fact, Al Gore was the man behind this, with one of his main advisors being an ex-drug company lobbyist.
D S_ drugs.html
It was much cheaper to produce the drugs domestically but the drug corporations didn't like that. Screw the sick and dying, we want our money damn it!!
Here is a link with more info:
http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/JF00/AI
I guess the drug companies should follow the example of entertainment. Patent the coating on the outside of the pills so that if anyone breaks open the pill to examine the contents to provide alternatives, sue the living fuck out of them.
I also know that one of the administrations top people is a college buddy of his Brazilian counterpart. A little back scratching?
It's cold in here......
"Dude, your Octanes on fire."
I hate patents as much - no, make that more than - the next guy. I have a basic objection to the idea of intellectual property. I don't believe ideas can be owned, no matter how much work goes into producing and communicating them. BUT - Brazil has established a patent system, and declared this patent valid. To go back on that simply because it's convienient - or even because of extreme duress - speaks volumes about Brazil's respect for its own laws and procedures. Imagine if we applied this logic to other scenerios. You can't choose whether to respect the value of law on a case-by-case basis.
Brazil has established that its law now works this way: Follow the law, unless you have a really really really good reason to want to break it. THat's a disasterous way to run a county. It makes the law itself useless.
Now, if brazil wanted to dismantle it's patent system entirely through due process, I'd be all for that. But that's not what's going on here. Selective rule of law is.
this is one brave and seriously laudable move ob behalf of Brazil, as the WTO could levy massive sanctions against them for this action. for those who don't know what the kids in Seattle were fighting in the streets over, the WTO is a transnational body-- a meta-government, if you will-- that is capable of coercing states (basically by suing them) out of erecting "barriers to free trade." a "barrier to free trade" is essentially any national law which presents any sort of a hindrance to international commerce. disregarding international patent conventions falls under this category (as does elements of Amercia's Endangered Species Act and our ban against importing British beef, as the WTO has taught us in the past).
see (R)TMark's http://www.gatt.org, a very honest parody of wto.org, for a more on the WTO.
the political fallout of a WTO action against Brazil on behalf of Roche would probably make Seattle look like a playground skirmish, so maybe the WTO might just back down. not that they've backed down in the name of human life before....
we'll just have to see to that.
This is all BS. The details are at http://duesberg.com/
we need more gonvernments who put the people first and not the corporations.IMHO this reflects well on your people and culture, and the ethics you hold.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
This is they way things actually work. The world we live in is mostly created through artificial laws and regulations that have no real basis in reality. Intellectual property? Yeah, whatever. If the drug is so simple to recreate that the government of brazil can do so without assistance from the drug's owners, so be it. When did Brazil's citizens agree to go along with IP Laws?
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Information and data cannot be owned -- they
lack scarcity, and to grant a monopoly on a single
idea is to steal from the potential of every
single person on the planet. The mere fact of
investment does not entail a responsibility for
returns. Or do you see competition as theft?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The issue is that Roche (et.al.) want to charge more for a few doses of drugs than people in third world countries can expect to make in a year.
Why ?? To quote Scrooge:
Then let them die, and thus decrease the surplus population. . . .
Especially as they've now cut into their profits. . .
I guess Micheal Criton can't be considered an authority on pharmasudicals, but I remember in the book one of the characters mentions that nobody wants to spend time researching things like cancer cures or AIDS cures, precisely because the government will intervene on behalf of the public, limiting your profitablity.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
It's the real world, and people do whatever they think they have to do, regardless of the law. Brazil's action is no more wrong than running red lights to get your kid to the hospital. I'd do that, and so would you, so spare us the sermon.
Think about it this way. If pharmecuticals are no longer profitable to research and develop, guess where all of that mad-cow, cancer, and other live threatening disease research is going to go. If you answered 'right down the fscking tubes!', you were correct!
If brazil wants to really help themselves, start giving away clean needles and condoms to the public. You can educate the people all you want, but if they are too poor to buy a needle (cuz all their money goes to drugs), or are horny as hell and don't have a rubber on them, people will ignore their knowledge and do whatever they want at the moment. Thus, aids is spread.
Life is full of choices, and if large groups of people are too stupid to use their brains and protect themselves, then I guess we didn't need them in the gene pool anyways.
There seem to be a great many people out there on slashdot who haven't bothered to look up exactly who designed the currently used anti-aids drugs. None of the companies who currently hold patents on them were actually involved in doing the research that generated the drug and demonstrated it's initial efficacy.
That research was funded at various public (and private) higher learning institutions throughout the world.
What the drug companies did do is purchase the patents from their current holders and chaparone the drug through FDA approval. Of course, the job of taking a drug through FDA approval is quite arduous and involves a considerable amount of cash, but NONE of that cash is spent in R&D, it's spent on efficacy studies and the ilk. (You might argue that this is a form of R&D, I like to look at it as QA.)
Of course, an interesting history lesson is to look at the United States point of view towards International Patents in the early part of the industrial revolution, especially regarding textile manufacturing. (Most of the patents for textile weaving were held in GB, and the US basically ignored them.) [Just in case someone thinks that the US has never behaved as brazil has]
Finally, regarding the search for a cure for HIV. A cure (if one is ever found) will most likely come about rhough basic research being funded already by NIH and other organizations at your local university instead of through targeted research by your local pharmesuitical group. Basic research by CDH and other groups is what gave us the knowledge to use various reverse transcriptase inhibitors, and it's what will bring in (if possible) the cure for AIDS.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
Nobody is going to be sympathetic to a single company vs. half a million people dying. That's just sick.
"I'm sorry son, Mommy and Daddy can't keep you alive because Mr. Rich needs a new ivory backscratcher. We just can't expect him to use the same one every day."
What kind of fucking morons run Roche. Lets evaluate the financial situation here. Brazil is spending 82 million dollars a year on this drug, between production and licensing. That means the licensing part is 32 million dollars. Licensing cost nothing for a company except executive paperwork which they have their underpaid secretaries or interns do for them. This is just greed.
Sometime before I die I'd really like to see a law passed against excessive greed. A law that states money is not greater than or equal to people or even the rights of people. Maybe if some CEO is living on the streets and he has to rip of somebody else living on the street then that would fall into a gray area. But making many suffer so you can please your elitist friends and shareholders as well as buy yourself a new yacht shouldn't constitute as legal.
This is a wonderfully idealistic view of the world, but woefully out of touch with reality. Operating systems are incredibly expensive to develop. If other developers follow RMS, then you're cutting the financial backing for R&D. Say good-bye to most any hope for a stable, secure OS, and fixes for a good number of other bugs. Sure, government-funded research will continue, but by destroying a software company's R&D budget, you'll be drastically slowing down the rate of technological innovation.
If developers truly care about fostering technological innovation AND providing support to those who need it, they would subsidize the cost of operating systems. Software companies would be able to recoup their huge R&D investments and lusers would have access to low-cost software. But this would likely require raising taxes... and that's a whole other topic of discussion.
Did anyone else notice that this is the same name as the detective from the movie "Falling Down" with Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall?
Seems weird to me.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Of course, as has been pointed out, pharmaceutical research is exppensive. I propose that the UN set up a cash reward for a cure. Surely (placing pinky at corner of mouth) ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS would be a great motivator for the pharmaceutical companies - especially if it were combined with an exemption from liability for any side effects of the cure.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
A Fair Price?? Brasil is capable of producing this drug at 40% of the cost. So, he is saving more people. We habe to remember people like Jonas Salk, whose only interest was the public wellfare.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Federal officials said they were unsuccessful in talks with Roche to lower the prices the country paid for nelfinavir. Company officials could not be reached for comment.
Company officials could not be reached for comment, mostly because they didn't feel like answering the question, "Why won't you work with Brazil to sell the rights to produce (not the actual drug mind you, just the rights) nelfinavir at a price they can afford so they can help save the lives of their people?"
The points regarding that this action will discourage R&D are probably true, to the extent that this move may cause companies to reduce their R&D budgets. But what good is R&D and new drugs and technologies if only x% of the world can take advantage of developments supposedly in the name of 'humanity'?
.. no leverage, no money management skills (when you don't have money, you don't learn how to manage it); and less education increases the likelihood that you will repeat the act that caused you to require the product in the first place somewhere down the road.
There are countries out there that could have many, many, many more people and companies working on the same solutions, thus spreading the R&D costs across more organizations and making information and research sharing more cost effective. Unfortunately, those countries are having a tough time, in various capacities, keeping their population alive, let alone wealthy enough to invest in new companies, research facilities, etc. Of course, neo-liberalism preaches the 'more for me, less for you' mantra, so the existing companies don't really warm to the idea of more 'competition'. If they could have their way, everyone in said countries would buy their drugs, but not get well enough to spur technological development in that country. Poor people are always a companies favorite customer
For an industry that was caught redhanded not so long ago in an industry-wide price fixing scam (yes, Roche participated), I think they have alot of nerve complaining about losing patent fees in areas where their cure could stop an epidemic of life-threatening deseises, in addition to helping set the stage for opportunities, development, research and growth in the countries that need it.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I would like to point out to all the people saying "Way to go Brazil for respecting lives more than money!" and "This is great when people put individuals before money!" and so on that this is actually about Brazil wanting to cash in.
Do you really think Brazil is doing this to save lives? Heck no! They just want to reduce spending. It's almost always about the $$$$. It's that simple, but "saving lives" is a great pretext to ripping off the patent holder.
Really, this decision by the Brazilian Government is damaging to the drug industry and other similar industries because they spend millions on research and development to create unique solutions to problems with the goal to sell that solution to those who want or need it.
Take away the incentive and you take away the motivation to create things like this in the first place. Of course, they will still make a killing with or without Brazil but the principle still holds.
"I had the cure for cancer but they wanted me to release in under the GPL so I burned it."
At the risk of being flamed, mod-ed down, and admittedly not having read the article, I think that this kind of trend may not be in our best interests. Patent laws don't just protect large corperations, they also protect ordinary people from large corporations. I know that the majority of people here think "intellectual property" is a joke, but when you start down that path, where will it lead you? Where does it end? Are all inventions now public domain? In this kind of atmosphere the "little guy" will get trampled. Imagine some "nobody" tinkering in his garage comes up with a new idea, a valuable idea. Without patent laws, any corp can snag the idea and make a mint because of production capacity and marketing, and the nobody stays a nobody.
At this point you say, "but we're not talking about inventions, we're talking about IP!" Where do you draw the line? Where do you make the distiction? A pharmaceutical company spends millions in research to come up with the correct combinations of chemicals that do exactly the right thing. How is this different that comming up with the right combinations of levers or parts to perform an operation or task?
Now you say, "But this is a treatment for a disease! Lives hang in the balance!" Again I say Where do you draw the line? It may not be as big a step as you might think from: Our people are dying, to: Our people don't have the quality of living that yours do.
Please don't get me wrong, I don't really sypathize with the swiss pharmaceutical company, or pharmaceutical companies in general. My problem is with this idea that nothing belongs to an individual or group. Yes I think things should be shared, but until we come up with a reasonable and concise way of determining how or when things should be co-oped "for the greater good," I don't think we should to it.
Then again when has my opinion mattered? Trick question: Never!
Zeus_tfc
Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog its too dark to read. Grouch Marx
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
Here from Brail, I must say that the government
tried to talk with Roche.
Roche said no no no.
So, they are NOT trying to destroy the pharmaceutical
industry, nor Roche, not kicking tha patents away.
They tried to negociate a lower price, respecting
all the legal procedures, but Roche , with all it's
power, repelled the terms.
They wanna $$$ , fsck the people.
So Brazil take this action...
Whadda ya make on this shoes?
You even notice that some cultures are so decadent that you wonder how they will survive? If they cannot learn from their mistakes, why should we hold their hands. If the AIDS epidimic ever ended up infecting and killing some signifigant minority. You can bet your ass the rest of the population would start saying "gee maybe we should keep our pants on". Sorry but if its minoritys and the uneducated who keep getting and then spreading these diseases, thats too bad. Maybe there is a deeper meaning there. Its really not too hard to think "gee if I don't screw this person, I may not get AIDS".
Here is an interesting question, whats going to happen when say 30 or 40 % of a population is going to be infected? Will there be wars between those infected and those not?
YOU ARE. That's right, as the cost of Drugs in the US goes up, so does your insurance & deductables.. You are personally paying the world's social welfare. I hope you enjoy it...
So go on, yahoos, cheer the Brazillian Government, "Stick it to the Man! Yeah!" You've earned it. (Well, you're paying for it, anyway)
One more thing: How about this scenerio? The drug companies decide to stop production on a cure for AIDS. Why bother? If 95% of the infected people in the world live in countires that won't pay for it, why would they continue to research a cure? As the free "management" drugs become available, MORE people will get AIDS in these countries, because MORE people will be living longer, and therefore fucking and shooting up longer... with no cure in sight.
The thing that makes AIDS such a devastating disease is that it takes too long to kill. So it has time to spread much farther. So extending the lives of people with AIDS without serious changes to their behavior will mean that more people will be infected. I don't know what the real impact will be, but I am curious.
On a side note, I do think drugs should be patentable. It's the only way to motivate real reasearch on a drug. But is anyone else bothered by the fact that a drug company will make more money by treating a disease like AIDS than curing it. I mean if one of these companies came up with a cure right now, their collective stock prices would drop like a rock: they would lose a steady stream of revenue for a short-term pop.
Kinda the same reason microsoft wants subscription based software ;)
--tim
you judge people's worth based on their sexual preference.
you believe that only gay people get AIDS.
You need to try subtlety. Claim that the stockholders of the drug company are being cheated or that we should stop trading with any country that violates a U.S. patent. You are dealing with a sharper bunch on here than you realize and no one here is going to believe that you are that stupid, bigoted, and narrow-minded. Try again.
"Did the company base their drug on any previous works done by public organizations?"
Good point. To counteract this, academic researchers could GPL their research work, so that any drug based on that "code" has to have an open source.
How about it? Or am I just stupid?
...that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection.
From each, according to his means, to each, according to his needs.
So, to hell with the drug company which spent an incredible amount of money discovering the drug, huh? That certainly provides an incentive for them to invest billions to discover the next treatment, doesn it?
Damned socialist morons -- you'll never get it, will you? When one cannot reap the rewards of one's work, the effort will not be invested. Proof? All those wonderful, life-saving treatments coming from China, Russian, Lybia, Cuba, Korea, etc.
-- Spaz!
Uhm, but should countries (and by that, I mean their peoples, cause everyone knows countries get their money fromf the people) also foot the bill for the huge advertising campaigns waged by the pharmaceutical companies? And trust me, that's probably why Brazil couldn't afford the price.
I dunno about you, but I don't need to see those incomprehensible ads for Viagra or Paxel. If I need the stuff, my doctor will prescribe it to me, and explain it, without showing me a tape of a commercial.
Just my $0.02
Sorry guys, I accidently posted this to the wrong article.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
"Human life is sacred and every life is worth more than all of the money in the world."
Funny how when it comes to the possibility of getting a fatal disease and causing DEATH, that could so easily be prevented, people seem to ignore this issue. Hoever when it comes to handholding people who had no respect for their own bodies, this kind of statement is always made.
public needs justify the disregard of patent protection
Yep, that's fine, as long as the "public" is you, and not someone else. Basically, our pressure group warfare type of lobbying efforts in the United States consists of people fighting over the right to say they are the public.
This is a sham. Brazil's government, or it's scientists, could never have invented these drugs. they're stealing the ideas. They're shortcutting the natural process of development. They want results, they don't want to work for them.
If I ever hear that "public needs" crap again, it will probably be about how the public needs my money, and somehow I'm not the public...
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Drug companies need to learn where they should be profitable. 3rd world countries and Brazil are not it.
Western Europe and North America are where the revenues come from. I think some compassion with Africa is needed, after all it is the West that really fucked things up for them in the first place.
Now for a country like China, no way in hell. They want to be a super-power, that means taking care of your own.
Drug companies have seen patent durations increased, have seen profits soar, and get government funding. So how about this. Enforce the patents, but shorten them back to 5 years.
Otherwise just like the RIAA MPAA, and all the other AAs, you brought this on yourself, so go fuck yourself.
Good job Brazil, but if China pulls this shit, there should be consequences. I ain't bitter that China bought the Olympics, actually hell I am, being from Toronto, we could have done a much better job.
Here is an interesting question, whats going to happen when say 30 or 40 % of a population is going to be infected?
Let's count shall we? We have epidemics on our hands in:- Large parts of Africa.
- Russia and it's former Soviet Union partners.
- Almost all densely populated areas in Southern America.
- Many Countries in Asia.
In conclusion, within now and 10 years, in all parts of the world except Western Europe and the USA people will start dropping like flies. The only reason people aren't panicking yet, aside from the ignorance common among most individuals, is that HIV has a very long incubation time, which varies wildly among different people, which explains why we don't have piles of corpses around us yet, but someday we will...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes. The Brazilian Government WILL PAY FOR THE PATENT to Roche, and will produce the drug for cost reduction instead of buying from Roche.
The next big thing(tm) might not have the same amount of effort or ressources ported to it if there's a precedent of patent smashing...
SOME are public funded, but not all... and I doubt that the majority of the top minds in this world are working in a public funded environment, I am not saying there's none, but surely not a majority.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
OK, so the subject line is a little inflammitory, and thus, by actually stating an opinion, I too am moderator-bait. We share that much at least. ;)
But as for your opinion itself... can you actually be serious?
You've got a country full of dying people. There's a drug available that can save a goodly number of them. It's expensive, and you're poor. You have the ability to reverse-engineer the drug (or just steal the formula outright, whatever) and produce it yourself for minimal cost.
Would you, as the leader of this country, REALLY allow people to DIE a slow, lingering, and very painful death just because a piece of paper says you have too?
I'm sorry, not me. As a hypothetical Brazillian leader, my duty is to serve the people of my country, not some foreign drug company. If they won't play ball on price, then we do what we gotta do to save them.
The point on education is a salient one, but this is not a zero-sum game - producing the drug does not mean a reduction in education, nor does increasing education do a dammned thing for those already infected.
This case is one of the best examples for the "IP is bogus, information wants to be free" position that I've seen. We're not talking about music files or games here, this is information that will actually SAVE REAL HUMAN LIVES, that a corporation wants hidden and protected SO IT CAN MAKE MONEY.
If that doesn't make you sick to your stomach, I don't know what will.
This is my real issue with the Libertarians of the world. There is no place in their world-view for the public project, done for the benefit of mankind. Everything must have a profit motive, and protecting profits has priority over all else.
Just like Marxist-Leninism goes too far, by wanting _everything_ state-owned and state-run, Libertarian goes too far by giving all control to the private sector. Either extreme is insane. The Real World requires compromise, and I for one am glad to see Brazil stick up for REAL freedom, and do what is right.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I've always wondered if the principle of
eminent domain can apply to intellectual property...
If the government can force the sale of private property, if it is in the public interest, can the government force a patent to be void for the same
reason?
in the long run, education will save a lot more people than this drug.
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP. This world is going to shit.
So screw the people who are already infected. They are going to die anyways (they cannot afford the treatment), and will not be able to afford the cure when one becomes available. By all means let us work to protect the rights of the shareholders. Who cares about some poor people who live in some third-world nation anyways.
Geez, some people think that simply because they are human, they have some inherent rights and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.
I suspect that if you were living in those slums in Brazil, you might have a slightly different opinion...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
http://www.viracept.com/3_DOSING/AGVR.pdf
Its pretty complex, but tell me why Brazil or anyone else should have to pay at least something for developing this, let alone testing it?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
brazil's efforts to treat all aids patients for free seems to be creating a subsidizing effect for the virus. according to the article 540,000 people in brazil have the aids virus. i wonder how that compares to other countries especially as a percentage of population? i guess you really can subsidize your way out of existence.
I don't know exactly what version of the Bible ou have been reading, but it is clearly not taken from the same writings that mine was. My Bible, in the Old Testiment, shows me a God who loved his people. He gave them a set of rules to live by called "Laws". These "Laws" were put into place to give a guideline as to how to improve your relationship with God and your fellow man. But, these laws were not obeyed, so they were punished by God.
The New Testiment shows a loving and forgiving God. A god who loved us so much, he send his son Jesus to die on the cross so that he may be resurected and our sins may be forgiven. God's own son tells us in
John 13:34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."
1 John 4:7 "Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God."
1 John 4:12 "If we love on another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."
So, I want you to tell me. With a God that wants us to love one another so much, do you really believe that he would send a plague like Aids? My answer is no, because when Jesus returns to Earth, we will all be judged and held accountable for the things in our lives. Those who are with Jesus at the time of his comeing will be forgiven and saved. Those who are not, I'm sorry to say, will not be so lucky.
So AC, Which side will you choose to be on.
(BTW: So that I don't get completely off topic, I think it was a great desicion. I say get rid of all drug patents. It's crazy... profits or lives, which would you choose?)
Intentional infection is VERY small part of the HIV problem, probably not even 1%, and thus, it would really not help at all.
...as a free lunch." That's why you had to invent computers, the Internet, the English language, and the capacity for rational though all by yourself before you made that post. Brazil's scientists could never have created these drugs because they're brown, I guess....and its government couldn't have helped because no government has ever done anything good for anyone ever. The "natural process of development" was instituted by God at Valley Forge.
This isn't the first time a patent has been siezed by a government. I beleive that also happend with Shockley and the transistor.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Hahahaha, just Brazil? Wake up IP land! We most people outside don't give a crap about your stupid "everything must be ruled by the holy thesis of supply and demand by market, and only market forces alone" (which includes protecting the interests of the holy multinational companies instead of the people)...
In my opinion, IP simply sucks, halts development and make lazyness; if ever, only a minuscule 5 years or so copyright/patent should be allowed, but nothing more.
Sure, your holy corporations won't make as much selling viagra over here, but they sure will have fun researching "human cloning" and other "non permited in certain countries research" and then later will sell you the byproducts of the work carried over here.
In case some of you wonders, yes, there is life outside USA borders, and, oh lord, people actually think different!
(time to start your holy market force inquisition/crusades..)
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
The social concept of property is based on the fact that the community as a whole profits from it. At least that was the idea, at first. Then came modern times and big companies.
Society still grants companies (and also single rich persons) protection of their property. To justify this grant, which is not a natural right, although many seem to think of it in this way, the companies must give something back to society in return. They have to act responsibly and with a view on the benefit of society.
If they don't, society has no reason at all to continue that grant. Brazil has realized that and they are doing the only reasonable thing: revoking that grant.
The discussion here seems to focus on whether the Brazilian government is justified in breaking international patents in order to provide their ill with much needed medicine. However disgusting I find it that such a batlle is being fought over the heads of AIDS sufferers, and that so many people here seem to think that death is preferable to patent infringement, the point begging to be made is a much larger one.
Should commercial companies be developing life saving drugs at all? I'm a capitalist, don't get me wrong. I believe in the free market, I understand the price of developing these drugs is astronomical and that if a commercial corporation develops them it wants to make money out of it. But the fact remains that a drug like nelfinavir was dceveloped and is being produced not for the benefit of the people it helps, but primarily for the benefit of Roche and its stockholders. That's wrong. Just plain wrong. We, as mankind, need an organization that develops drugs like this, not for commercial benefit, but for humanity. Brazil is just the tip of the iceberg here. The are countries far poorer than Brazil with a much higher infection rate. How does Ghana pay for this stuff? When commercial considerations cost lives, those considerations should be taken away. That can only be done, as far as I can see, by developing these drugs in a non-profit environment. Not everything begins and ends with dollars. At least it shouldn't.
I know, it's a pipe dream to think that, in the cash-hungry corporate world we currently live in, anything like this can be done on a not-for-profit basis, but if we don't stop worshipig the dollar with quite the fervor we do now, I don't think our future looks too bright.
I want the fire back.
As I read the comments here on Slashdot, somethings hits me...
Do you really think that the pharm industry is going bad and needs this money?
Besides, do you really believe that they're the only people on Earth that can do R&D of drugs? Or that the profit they have is used solemnly only for R&D?
This industry is making money on several drugs they didn't research or develop... That, I suppose is right?
I don't intend to say everything is wrong in the industry, but they can spare some bucks to a poor country to save some lives. I'm not even saying that we should never pay for royalties in drugs, but the price should take account the affordability of the people buying it. Saying "I did the research, so I'm entitled to charge whatever I want to" isn't what I would call being nice.
Sometimes things aren't only about profit.
Guilherme Bradasch
How Brazil handles itself *after* its decision to go ahead and manufacture the drug will define whether Brazil is a country that stands for the rule of law or for the rule of lawlessness.
Brazil is exercising one of the undisputed powers of a sovereign -- to take what it needs. A lawful sovereign pays reasonable compensation for what it takes. Thus, in civilized countries, when land is taken to build a road, the landowner does not get to veto the road, does not get to extort an unreasonably high price for being the last piece of land needed to build the road, etc. He gets reasonable, just compensation, and such a right is guaranteed by the courts of the country.
In common law countries the "rule of necessity" is not limited to sovereigns. For example, you are permitted to tresspass in certain conditions because of necessity. A classic example is a ship docking to avoid a killer storm. That does not mean not having to pay afterwards for what you take, or what you damage, however. "Necessity" defines conditions where you can "take it and pay a reasonable amount."
Brazil had a contract with Roche to provide drug that it is going to honor. Brazil is gearing up to provide its own generic version of the drug after the contract expires because it has been unable to reach agreement with Roche as to a price at which Roche will continue providing it. Brazil is taking. If it decides to take for free, it stands as an example of lawlessness. In such a case, it should be punished heavily by international trade organizations.
If it taking because of the impending necessity, with the intent to pay an agreed amount afterward, then it really is a tempest in a teapot. "Reasonable" in this case is certainly *not* what the generic would cost on the generic market. Reasonably prices are not negotiated under the threat of imminent death -- that's why courts often settle the "take and pay" price assigned to necessity situations.
Lets start by saying that what Brazil is doing is illegal. I doubt anyone is arguing with that.
Now, regarding the issue of it being wrong.
I don't know about this particular drug, but there are many pharmaceuticals that are like software: Once you have all the necessary information they are very cheap to produce. As with software there is a large up front cost. Funny that when people here start talking about software patents they're screaming, but when all that's involved is people dying then they're willing to let them die.
If was drunk, and there was someone bleeding to death, barring other options I probably would still try to drive them to the hospital. That's right, illegal act to save someone's life, even a complete stranger's. Heck, I'd probably be willing to steal a car to do it.
Now, Brazil is stealing this roche drug. Trying to save people's lives. Can't say that it's wrong from my point of view.
Actually yes. For example see this article in Salon.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
You can't patent ANYTHING without publishing it, and you won't get any data from universities without cooperation. Drugs are not Coca-Cola.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This reminds me of the RIAA bitchin about piracy affecting profits when they are now making more revenue and net income than they have in their entire history.
Let's have a look at the poor poor drug companies... They make you think a little charity would kill them.
Roche
In the first half of 2001 the Roche Group achieved consolidated results of 14,5 billion Swiss francs. This represents a growth on an adjusted basis of 6% in both Swiss francs and local currencies.
Group operating profit and net income were stable at 2,4 billion Swiss francs and at 3,0 billion Swiss francs respectively. As expected the EBITDA margin and the operating profit margin decreased slightly.
PFIZER INC = $256.4 Billion
Pfizer Inc. is a global pharmaceutical and consumer products company which discovers, develops, manufactures and markets innovative medicines for humans and animals. For the six months ended 6/30/01, total revenues rose 8% to $15.33 billion. Net income from continuing operations totaled $3.72 billion, up from $945 million. Results reflect increased sales of Lipitor, Neurontin, Zyrtec and Norvasc and a $1.79 billion reduction in costs related to the merger with Warner-Lambert.
Merck = $159.3 Billion
Merck and Co., Inc. is a pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, produces and markets human/animal health products and services. Merck also provides pharmaceutical benefit services. For the six months ended 6/30/01, sales rose 27% to $23.24 billion. Net income rose 8% to $3.47 billion. Results reflect strong growth in worldwide human health sales, and other newer and established products, partially offset by higher materials and production costs.
(I got these mostly from their websites and quote.yahoo.com)
So these three alone have over $10 billion in PROFITS. That's after all their research into drug development has been paid. And they want more. Now, I can understand that if they were running at a loss...fine - raise the price of drugs in rich contries to pay of the R&D and give the drugs (AT COST) to poorer nations to improve their goodwill.
---
This
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
I do wish people would stop it with the "how are they going to fund research?" crap. If you look at the big picture of drug research, and where the costs really are, you would see that a lot of it is inflated numbers caused by "economic factors" and other such nonsense. That is how a lot of universities are able to continue to do excellent pharma research. The companies are hindered for less noble reasons than academia.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
I might be wrong, but last I heard, this isn't a CURE for aids. This is just delaying the agony. Even worse, the people on the drugs might believe they are healthy, and have a greater chance of infecting others.
Is this worth breaking international law?
If we were talking about a cure, something that could wipe out all AIDS in the country, maybe then I would side with the people, and say "Break the law". But now, this is just a short term improvement in how the ill will live, and I think the drug company has the right to charge for it.
--ST
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
I see but many of my American countrymen rushing to the defense of the drug companies and their patents, all in the name of "R&D" continuation, or lack thereof should ignoring patents become a trend. To a country of workers who wouldn't, nay, couldn't afford even the most discounted of prices, I applaud Brazil's bold move to tell the drug cartel to take their patents, roll them up nice and tight and... *ahem*.
The notion that they will stop researching if Brazil or ALL third world countries (South Africa comes to mind as an example) disregard their patents is absurd, what with America alone being diseased enough to keep them running. Cancer treating patents being snuffed in soandso? Push cigarettes more in America. AIDS treatments gone generic in soandso? Whittle off STD-discussions in public schools. I can think these up, they can, and companies that don't die off. Evolution with the cruelest of corporations surviving. Whatever you think of this arguement, always keep this in mind.
They do not need anyones sympathy.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
For the sake of liberty we must prevent and undo
intellectual property protections. It is simply
unacceptable that something that I may discover,
a thought I may have, data that I might collect
might be blocked or require a fee for my use.
I assert that any piece of data, any idea, any
thought that I might acquire or synthesize is
something that I may use as I see fit, with no
restrictions on that action as such, including
sharing it with others or using it for various
purposes.
I will not comprimise on this.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I mean, they can't really be relying on countries as poor as Brazil for their revenue, that would be plain wrong. On the otherhand, developed countries whose people do not live in such deep poverty, should pay for the drugs.
As long as Brazil doesn't try to profit from these drugs i.e. sell them to other countries, then I don't see a problem.
However, I cannot help wondering if a black market will arise, where the drug is trafficked from Brazil and those in need who can't afford it, to those in developed countries who are simply too tight to pay for it.
Or maybe that is not such a good idea. Ever go to Mexico and see how cheap drugs are there? Not just the generics, but the real deal from the US manufacturer stuff? Guess who pays the full costs on that? You guessed it - all the citizens of the good old US. See, the EVIL drug companies actually do give cut rate prices on all sorts of drugs already to prevent the Brazil's of the world from stealing their stuff.
I'm thinking... let's say some pharmaceutical company develops a drug that can cure AIDS, do they have to wait like two years to get their patent before being able to distribute that drug?
I have no idea how it goes, does anyone know?
First, sorry for my English, I am from Brazil.
The role thing is misunderstood.
Brazil tried many times to reduce the price of one drug from Roche, that alone represents more the 28% of the total investiment in AIDS in Brazil.
Since it failed, Brazil decide to produce the drug and will PAY FOR THE PATENT, instead of import the drug. This will reduce the cost about 40%.
Right?
Ok. I work for a Pharma, and if I can't get money by charging for the products THAT I INVENT, how will I be funded? By kind-hearted people like you? I doubt it. Are you going to send me a check for xxx million dollars, on a promise that I *might* come up with a cure for something? Again I doubt it. Public funding is a great addition to the greatly needed funds, but reselling the product recoups a far great amount of the R&D costs.
Brazil is a sovereign government. In other words they have the right to decide what the laws in their country are. If they decide to honor human life over intelectual property that is their choice. In the same way there are countries in which software patents do not exist. In those countries you could implement one-click shoping and there is nothing Amazon could do about it. Just because there is an international agreement dosen't mean you have to follow it. Look at the U.S. and Dubya's opinion of the Kyoto accord. The international community agreed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but the U.S. is a sovereign power, and doesn't have to abide by it if they don't want to.
International politics are no different then playground politics. There are two kids playing on the playground Tom and Jack. Jack wants to play on the swing, Tom dosen't want him to. Tom can do a few things, he can try and reason with Jack, he can threaten Jack, or he can go get the teacher. The pharmasucitcal companies and their parent nations can try and convince Brazil this is a bad thing, they can threaten Brazil with sactions or military retaliation, or they can go running to the WTO. The teacher(WTO) can still only do so much though. If Jack decides that the fun from playing on the swing is worth going to the principal's office then there isn't much the WTO can do. Especially if Jack knows that his did won't punish him when he gets home. On the field of intenational politics, the same as on the playground one rule reigns over all others, might makes right. If the U.S. wanted to invade Brazil and stop them, they could. But the U.S. isn't going to, but this little IP dispute isn't worth a war to anyone.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
Unfortunately, this ends up being a lot more philosophical a statement than it initially seems. These patents, and the money they make, may not affect the bigwigs all too much at the pharmaceutical companies, but they do affect the lower workers who need the patent money to put bread on the table.
There are a variety of reasons why drugs are as expensive as they are, not the least of which is greed. But also insurance premiums, lawsuits, and salaried employees all play a part in raising prices, so making an all-inclusive statement that this move provides "life before dollars" really isn't exactly true. Money is a system that affects everyone, and some people's lives *will* be screwed by the breaking of the patent law.
Eli Lilly (couldn't find stats on Roche quickly, so I picked any old famous drug maker)in the last six months had $5.84 billion in sales, of which $1.63 billion was profit (go ahead and check biz.yahoo.com symbol lly).
And that's NET after R&D is paid for. Remember these are companies, any revanues spent on anything, including R&D aren't taxed. Any traditional financial/manufacturing/etc. company would jiz themselves for a 28% profit margin, most have 3-10%
So how much money should a company make off of a drug? More than you and your extended family can earn in 200 years not ajusted for inflation?
The value of human life > *. Never forget that.
Another thing, don't give me any "what ifs" since people are dying horrible deaths NOW!
Another plague (bubonic [sp?]plage killed a great number of people in Europe) except worldwide this time - wonderful.
There are a lot of posters hear failing to see the big picture. AIDS is a big, famous, scary disease, so of course the medicine should be free. But Heart Disease makes you just as dead. So maybe that medicine should be free, too. Oh, cancer makes you dead too? Well, lets make those drugs free, too. How about infection? You can die of infection in the third world, too. Lets make them free, too. We'll keep paying for Prosac, because only rich people take that and you don't die of depression (usually). So what about when the next big disease comes along. Who finds the cure? I'm sure all the independently wealthy scientists will work on that, since they don't need a paycheck, but will they find it? Or we could just become socialist, so the government decides which diseases the scientist work on, because all the successful counties in the world are Socialist.
The harsh reality is that rewarding people for finding a cure means that cures will get found. More people will live longer, better lives who have contracted AIDS, high blood pressure, cancer, or infections, because there was incentive for people to find cures. Not all will live, but if there were no cure (or treatment) no one would live. And if there were no incentive, very few cures would be found. Is the current balance between costs and rewards perfect? Probably not. But good luck making it perfect.
While its true that it costs a lot of money to make medicines that save people, I think part of the blame should be laid at teh feet of the drug makers themselves. Getting rich off of sick people who have no other choice strikes me as patently offensive.
Yes, its true that they have intellectual property rights but its also true that you are dealing with deparate people and governments. In an Ayn Rand view, we coudl let all those people die, and make sure that the next generation is educated and will not need the hand outs, but that is simply too black and white a view.
I am reminded of the argument that if you have a loaf of bread and then men next to you has nothing and he has children to feed, you can argue all you want, but he is going to go after your bread.
The point (sorry for rambling) is that perhaps its time that this sort of research for the public (unless we want to say that drug research is not for the public, but only for those that have money to pay) should go back to the university where IP will no longer apply (look at the fiasco that Wisconsin is generating but claiming that anything that someome else makes fromt their stem cells wil have to be ok's by the Wisconsin department).
I thinkk that as healthcare becomes more and more a public commodity (it never really was until very recently) that we will have to start treating it as such. Just as you can not own the water and deny it to the thirsty, I'm afraid to say that the same thing is happening to medicine and to drug research in particular.
Anyway, thanks for reading
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Considering the amount of money that the drug company spends on PR, why didn't they just make a special, very-low cost licensing deal with the BRazilian government to allow them to manufaxture cheap pills purely for use in Brazil i.e. they can only produce what they can use. Think of the massive amounts of positive publicity that could produce for the patent holder at very little cost, because the Brazilian government could never afford to pay for the pills anyway!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
If someone doesn't screw those companies pretty soon, they won't be alive long enough to collect on any of that.
The disturbing thing about most of the comments I've read here have exhibited the same mentality that caused the disease to spread so much in the first place: It's the belief that AIDS is *their* problem.
Brothers and sisters, AIDS is our problem. It makes the bubonic plague look like a bad case of hiccups. After years of being bombarded by pleas to practice abstinence or safe sex, people are still so numbheaded that they go out and spread the disease anyway.
When a city is burning and the guy with the fire truck isn't helping because the citizens can't afford to pay what he thinks he should get for his services, there comes a time when you just have to take the bastard out and steal his truck.
Got Rhinos?
If Brazil has no money to buy the drugs, we get one of two situations:
1. Brazilians with AIDS have no money to buy drugs. Therefore, the drug companies get no money from them, and the AIDS patients die.
or
2. Brazilians with AIDS have no money to buy drugs. The Brazilian govt violates the patent, the patients get their drugs, but the drug companies get no money from them.
Looks like #1 is a lose-lose situation.
At least in scenerio #2, the people get their drugs.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
A lot of people are saying how the poor drug companies have to make a profit (err, hand over fist profit) or else they will shut down and stop producing cures (err, temporary treatements) to diseases. There would be no choice but to make the public pay for all R&D on drugs.
Of course this posibility is quite far fetched with drug companies raking it in like they are now. But if you can, just imagine how great it would be.
First of all, remember that public funds account for a huge portion of the drug companies R&D budges (something like 40% I think). That's not counting the public funds that go into the basic science behind it all (the chemistry, the biology, etc).
Can you imagine what the world would be like if we covered the other 60% and drugs were created and sold with the purpose of helping people instead of making shareholders millions. A world were you would pay a a little more in taxes, but where you would buy medicine for the tiny cost that it takes to produce it. A world were the brightest minds worked on cures to real diseases instead of helping Bob Dole get it up.
Having a hard time with imagining something so different huh? Me too.
Medicine first, then ethics.
> Operating systems are incredibly expensive to develop.
No they are not. Was the original DOS some massive thing requiring billions? No. There are plenty of RTOS's (Real-Time Operating Systems) that have optional windowing systems, comples graphics primitives, TCP/IP stacks, Java virtual machines, etc. Why not slap together a CPU and stuff it onto one? Why, because there are no apps for that.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Considering the vast majority of people who need treatment for AIDS are far below the poverty line, speaking globally, maybe drug R&D can afford to be "stifled" for a little while so that its benefits can actually be used to heal people rather than earn money.
You're right, it probably will stifle research somewhat, but we aren't going to go back to "amputate or medicate". Research will still go forward. But in addition, the benefits of that research will be accessible to those who need it most, and not just to those who can afford it.
Simple economics: You can always throw more money at research in the name of "advancing science". That doesn't mean that taking money away from research when people need treatment is a move backwards or anything of the sort. As the article clearly states, the government attempted to negotiate for lower prices, but were turned down. What do you want them to do? Allow their citizens grow ill and die because of a foreign patent law?
Advancing medical research is laudable, but not if those advances are used for profit instead of for healing. That is the issue here, and I think that the Brazilian government made the rational choice.
Today it has been announced that five major drug companies have decided to cease their research into new AIDS combating drugs. The companies have stated that they can no longer recoup the billions of dollars of research and testing that goes into developing the drugs, as many countries have begun manufacturing AIDS drugs without paying royalties to drug companies. Many of these royalty free drugs have found their way into foreign markets, such as the US and Europe, and have depressed global sales for the drug companies that have developed them. Spokespersons from Merck, Roche, and GlaxoSmithKline have stated that they will combine their previous AIDS research teams into a new super-research taskforce with the aim of developing a drug that will help prevent heartburn.
http://www.roche.com/home/investor/inv-finance/
They are pulling in cash hand over fist. Now, why couldn't they negotiate a lower price w/ Brazil so that wouldn't send half their budget to Roche?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Being a socialist i must say that this is a victory for the proletariat. On a human side one has to realize that no one has the right to profit off an epidemic and its great that finally a nation, even a 3rd world one, is ready to stand up against this bull shit. Peace
-haz
This is the kind of thing that "The Market" is supposed to solve, right? If the Roche would rather not sell than lower its prices, surely some other company should be able to sell to that market.
The patent is the obstacle. Nobody else can manufacture the drug, because it's Roche's patented drug. Sure, they (probably) deserve to have a TEMPORARY monopoly on the drug to recoop their R&D costs, but this is a situation where the market is COMPLETELY FAILING. All of the religion about the "Free Market" this and that completely breaks down if monopolies are involved, even temporary ones.
1. The public good is not being served (drugs not reaching sick people
2. Roche isn't making money, because they're not selling to this market
In this situation, everyone loses. So, Brazil's government is basically saying, well, we tried proper channels, and it didn't work. We still have sick people, so we're forced to break the law.
Governments all over the world have a long history of throwing aside the rules and morality when an "emergency" is deemed. Sometimes those emergencies are crap (flag burning, kiddie porn, Reefer madness, protecting Kuwait) and sometimes they're not. Of course, that's according to my beliefs. I expect other citizens would disagree.
It's sad, because you want to believe that at the very least, the governments of the world would obey their own rules, but COME ON! That doesn't happen.
I for one am glad to see that this time the rules and "what is Right" is being shoved aside in the interests of ACTUAL CITIZENRY rather than big oil or credit card companies.
Mucous membranes are the part of your brain that, like, make you think about mucous. --Beavis
So, in the short-term this may seem like a good idea, but in the long term it could do serious damage to the search for an AIDS cure.
Yes! and damage every other medical research going on as well. People dont seem to realize that these companies have to use these profits to pay for all their failed research as well.
I just finished reading a book, and I really hate it when people spew Ayn Rand quotes, but it looks like Roche is a real-world example in what she wrote about in Atlas Shrugged. I dont think the whold world is going this way, but this imaginary quote fits: "Oh, they're just a rich corporation, they make massive profits on this drug that is very cheap to produce, they can afford to give some of that away."
Take away the reason they got into business, they will stop doing business. Simple.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
How many /.ers have worked for a pharmaceutical company? How many have seen 7 years of research go down the tubes after promising studies find that the drug has a serious adverse effect on .5% of the people taking it and the last 7 years of your life were for naught.
Does anyone around here understand how business works anymore? Where do you think retirement funds get funded from? Corporations are not run by some maniacal CEO hellbent on a conspiracy for world domination. I'm not out for world dominatino. I know my manager isn't. I've met his boss and his bosses boss. At what level do people instantly turn evil?
Why do you think companies spend, on average, $1 billion to develop each new marketable drug? For fun? A drug spends as much as 10 years in the research phase before going to market. Anywhere along the way it may be found to be a) not as affective as hoped or b) not safe enough to market. Rinse, lather, repeat. Assuming it does make it to market, it may only have 5-7 years before generic competition forces the original research company to stop selling the drug for any kind of profit. The government, btw, does not contribute any measurable percentage of the research cost to the private company.
Don't like marketing? I hate it more than anyone else out there, I assure you. I see it every day and it makes me ill. But it helps make sales, and it subsidizes low income patients (free samples to doctors from sales reps mainly go to elderly and those without health insurance). And all those revenues go back to, guess what, research for more drugs.
Don't like the pharmaceutical companies and their high prices? Don't buy their drugs. I will help keep them in business. I'm paying for a service (research). A drug's price isn't the price of materials or shipping really. It's payment for the service they did by spending time and money researching and refining a single compound out of tens of thousands that may help me live longer or better. But to turn around and say thanks and not be willing to pay for it is asking thousands of people to work for free and without reward for all their hard work.
As much as I would like to think that helping my fellow man is enough of a reward, I know that it isn't. It doesn't pay my light bill or put food on the table or get me any of those nice shiny computers I play with. I work to make a living to pay for things that I need (and the extra goes to things I want). Extrapolate that up from the individual and you have corporations. That's just the way it is. They need money to pay the light bills, run their supercomputers, and pay the scientists. And you need to survive the drug pipeline (go talk to Bayer and Merck about how much those suck right now).
[Disclaimer: none of this is representative of my employer, my clients, or anyone but myself. Two cents.]
It's interesting, because that's just the problem most people have with George W. Bush's decision to go ahead with the US missile shield. Why risk having millions of Americans subjected to slow, lingering, painful death from nuclear radiation when we can just ignore the treaty we signed with Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty we signed with Russia all those years ago?
You know, the "Q" word. Quarantine.
people don't want to accept responsibility for their actions.
assuming i know that I can get AIDS through unprotected sex with an infected person, and I then go and have unprotected sex with an infected person, am I then revoking my rights to bitch and moan that I got AIDS? I believe so.
but most people don't for some reason. I got AIDS, so my government should now get me the drugs I need for free/cheap so that I can now save myself and/or continue my risky lifestyle by disregarding a company's hard and expensive work to find and create cures/vaccines/other drugs to help AIDS victims.
Sometimes even calling them "victims" is a misnomer... simply for the reason that I feel many people aren't victims, but are culprits.
but let just stupid/poor people die.
What kind of nature would it be if the weak were kept in the gene pool ?
Idealism, helping your fellow humans is nice, but it's just that, idealism. There is a reason it's not called realism.
I think Brasil does the wrong thing here, and
should be penalized.
I'd just like to point out the history here.
Drug companies have been jerking around the third world for a LONG time now, and Brazil is not just an example: they will likely be the first pebble in a land-slide.
The tactic to date has been to provide these drugs at sky-high prices in those countries so that only the very rich can affort them. Then, a G8 nation sees that Hatians can't affort AIDS drugs, so there's a funraiser or foreign aid to pay for drugs for the locals.
This profiteering has been a major complaint of the entire third world to the UN and WTO for a long time (it's not just AIDS drugs). However, until now, no country felt that it was enough of an emergency to risk WTO/US/UN reprisals to stand up to these tactics. Brazil has offered to buy the drugs (not the people, the country), but at reasonable prices. The drug companies refused. Brazil has thus begun making their own.
This is not theft. This is not a case of someone trying to get a free ride. This is a case of human needs vs. corporate profits.
The possibility that I won't die soon good. I say this even though I don't have any particular disease at the moment.
I said you were unlikely to read something critical to your views because of the above statement. You may have read it, but I doubt you have fairly considered the arguments. Otherwise I doubt it would be such a black and white issue for you.
Anonymous posts are filtered.
Brazil is breakign no law. The treaty gives any nation the ability to disregard foreign patent laws if they invoke a national emergency, OR invoke the health of their citizens.
What do you know... two wrongs (bad laws) DO make a right.
Those deluded souls claiming that drugs are inherently expensive to research could do well to think again.
There are two problems with this issue. First, the valuation for R&D costs are produced by corporates whose very justification for their prices rests upon their claims of huge up-front expenses which must be amortised over many units to deliver a profit.
However if this were true, said companies would suffer multiple years of huge drops in profit as their research expenses totted up. Given that their recovery of costs occurs over many years, the dips in profit would be severe, even forcing them to discontinue research as continued R&D would be impossible to sustain.
Now go take a look at some of these companies. This is not an exaggeration. Some of them can buy their own country. Do those who imagine drugs are *that* expensive to produce seriously expect us to believe that somehow these companies are sustaining continued rising profits in the face of stunningly expensive R&D?
Of course not.
The answer of course is that drug research merely costs time and effort. Far more money is spent by drug companies attempting to gain the necessary influence with government spheres to achieve exclusive or dominant product distribution or subsidisation than is ever spent on R&D.
There is also the issue of research focus. Drug companies as we know them are inherently uninterested in creating solutions or 'cures' as we know them. It's simply far more profitable to manufacture substances which create a dependency in the afflicted. Anyone who believes otherwise is simply living in cloud cuckoo land.
I think Brazil's move is timely and important. If governments do not start pushing against the massive power bases being assembled by these corporates, they will simply find themselves becoming progressively more irrelevant.
This move is a blow against the Zaibatsus. Far from discouraging research it does in fact strike against rabid profiteering. If Roche isn't interested in Aids drug research, there are plenty of other less greedy companies that are.
I find it hysterical that those screaming about the importance of patent protection seem to forget the most basic law of free enterprise. If there's a demand, the market will fill it.
Don't worry guys, the sky isn't going to fall. However we may find rabid capitalism subside in the face of some humanity and common sense.
Those who are claiming that Brazil should be prepared to pay Roche's price clearly have no idea just how bad the Brazilian situation is.
Tell you what guys, why don't you sit back in your middle place complacency surrounded by your safe shield of Americana and pass judgement on the people who are living and dying at Roche's whim. That's a good idea. Now let's grab your mother, your daughter, your son, your brother or your uncle, fill them full of HIV and spirit them off to a land with Brazil's problems. Wonder if you'd change your tune then.
You sit there and spit bile because you prioritise IP over human life. The real reason is much more basic. You hate the idea of someone getting something for nothing. It wounds your rabidly capitalist soul.
Your protestations that patent protection is necessary for continued research are just so much fluff and you know it.
I wonder if you'll ever be able to realise that you're sickening hypocrites who are dead on the inside.
By the way. Dead people can't be consumers. Think about that.
Noone is saying the companies are villains.
Its just that most brazilians cannot afford the product. So this is money they would not be making anyway.
So we can either force the brazilians to mortgage their asses to hell, we can force the companies to sell something below cost, or best of all we can leave them both to their own means.
The pharmecuitical companies are not being materially harmed, dont be fooled.
Hmmmm, what will happen not to the corporate motive to NOT find a cure?
Now that this has happened?
Come on, the fact that this had to happen is a result of the worst possible combination of MORAL decision making. The Brazilian government is making a bad decision, but it is still the best decision under the circumstances. International law and patents are important yes, but human lives are infinitely more important. Does anyone here get that?
And don't go thinking about any "long-term" crap about saving lives by maintaining corporate profits on research through patents. That's BS too. Governments have a very direct responsibility for the quality of their constituents lives. That's why we support (through taxation usually) research on environmentally friendly technologies, basic reasearch on health, etc. That is the long-term stuff.
By breaking the patent on AIDS drugs, Brazil is definately keeping their long-term interests in mind:
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Even though it's an AC posting it should be modded up....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
First of all, Brazil has the biggest economy in South America, with GDP of 1.057 trillion US dollars. With a population of about 173 million people(17 percent poverty rate), that comes down to about 6000 dollars per head. Now compare this with a real poor country, say, Zimbabwe, which has 11.2 million people (60 percent poverty rate), GDP of 18 billion US dollars, 1600 dollars per head. Yes, Brazil is a poor country by US and European standards, but it's not the desparately poor country that can not afford to pay for the healthcare of its own people as some people here seem to believe.
Second of all, according to the CNN article, the annual Brazilian budget for fighting AIDS is about 293 million dollars, and they will save about 40 Million dollars by producing the drug without license from the patent holder. Now they may sounds like big numbers, but let's compare them with something meaningful, say Brazil's defense budget, which was only 13.408 billion dollars.
It seems to me that if they are serious about the AIDS problem and the health of their people, they have plenty of resources. All they need is the political will to use them.
Maybe I'm just being silly, but it seems to be very shortsighted to violate International Treaties just to save 40 Million dollars, something a country like Brazil can easily afford.
Though I agree with WHAT they are doing, I'm not in agreement with HOW they are doing it.
Simply put, a government should not be in the business of breaking the law. That is inherantly DANGERIOUS. What is to stop them from breaking other laws to supress someone, "in the public good"?
What Brazil should do is pass and impliment a new law that limits the scope and duration of ALL patents, and provide for mandatory non-exclusive licensing of all patents. But it should apply to ALL patents, foreign and domestic, equally and without discrimination.
The patent holder SHOULD be compensated. But it should be reasonable. To not compensate them at all IS theft, this time on a grand government scale. That is reprehensible.
To do it the way they are doing it is to set a dangerous legal precedent for their own citizens, and to discourage any further development of drugs and technology for their benefit.
If a farmer grew food, only to have the government come and steal what it wants when it wants to (against the law), the farmer would be less likely to care about how much he grows, or worse, to give up the business (because he couldn't even feed his own family). This ultimately hurts both the government and the people. This is one reason why communist/collectivism has failed every time and everywhere it's been tried.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
It seems to me, that no matter the government's true intention, that if their actions benefit their people, then corporate rights be damned.
Ooh... poor little pharmaceutical company can't get its inane quantities of profit off a life-saving drug... well they can just go and get it off their useless drugs, like Viagra...
These companies should be subsidizing life-saving drugs, and giving them away, simply for the priviledge of being allowed to keep their corporate charters. Companies cannot continue to exist for their own benefit, they have to be accountable to the public, and of service to the public.
And who cares about the government, really. Castrate the corporations, and you'll see a lot more good coming out of them (governments)...
If I spent a fortune researching and creating a drug, you bet I would be pissed if someone else started making my drug without my permission.
The excuse of R&D costs is a red haring as they are spending more to market the drugs then to produce them.
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Lets use the DMCA to arrest all the polititions in Brazil for breaking the patent (we can arrest Russians, why not others), and all of the Swiss drug companies for being capitilists (which must be illegal somewhere).
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
There are a few reasons this is a bad trend. Now they are using a public health problem as an excuse to void a valid international patent because they did not get the agreement they wanted. This plays very well in the press, "bad evil company would rather see people die than sell their stuff cheaper" instead of saying "country refuses to pay a fair price for drugs to save its own people"
... I imagine King George (from whome we inherited this asinine system of entitlements in the first place) was pissed when the US declared independence and you know what? That didn't make it any less right to do so.
Except that three assumptions here are inaccurate:
1) Monopolies do not yield anything remotely approaching "fair prices" without serious government intervention (e.g power companies and baby bells) and often not even then.
2) Monopolies aren't necessary for R&D expenses to be recouped, and a reasonable profit to be made.
3) You imply that the characterization of "bad evil company would rather see people die than sell their stuff cheaper" is unfair and inaccurate, when in fact the historical and contemporary evidence is rather strong to the contrary.
Software patents are bad. So are every other form of patent that grants government enforced monopolies and undermines the very free market upon which our economies depend. There are other ways to finance expensive R&D besides grantintg 20 year monopolies and allowing said monopolies to extort exhorbitant prices from dying people and leaving millions of less fortunates to die (or extorting payment from their impoverished governments).
To paraphrase another blindly pro-IP comment: This should make sick every one of you that has a Free (as in liberty) bone in their body. Ideas are not property, nor are inventions inherently something to be possessed, except as a result of arbitrary laws which have turned out to have the opposite effect as was intended, namely to slow progress rather than accelerate it, and now in the process are actively resulting in the suffering and death of millions. Frankly, I do not care if someone who thinks they have a god given right to a monopoly on an idea simply because they won the footrace to the patent office is pissed
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I see a lot of people complaing that this is not "fair" and that the poor drug company is not going to do more research. These people are forgetting that the same drug companies send their scientists to the amazon to study "popular" medicine of the brasilian indians and then they go back and patent a drug that have been used for maybe thousands of years by the amazon indians. If this is not enougth they come back here (I happen to live in brasil) and expect us to pay a very expensive price on the same thing that our people were already using.
A drug dealer is a criminal because he sells drugs that kill people right? Why a drug company isn't criminal when it refuses to sell drugs that saves lives, for a resonable price? This may not be illegal, but it is certanly unetical.
Also the goverment of Brasil have asked the company to reduce the price. They refused to do so. The goverment then gave the "go ahead" on the production of this drug.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I support both the drug company and the people.
The simple fact is that drugs cost TOO MUCH. Yes, the company needs to turn a profit and to recoup R&D expenses, but x00% profits are not necessary for this. To my fellow americans....how many of you take claratin? It's about $70 for a months worth of the drug. If you go across the border into canada, you can get the SAME drug over the counter.....and how much does it cost? Last month when I bought some it was on special....2 boxes (essentialy 2 months) for the price of one.....which was $18 Canadian. The drug isn't any cheaper to make in Canada, so why the price difference?
The drug companies to need to get a clue....yes, make a profit, yes pay for R&D, but keep the drug prices within reach for those who need it.
On a side note....to claim that a drug company can't make a profit at the price the generic drugs are being sold at is crazy.....if that were the case, then the generic companies (i'm not talking about state run production) would go out of business.....and they aren't. Just something to think about.
If all countries did this...
;), THIS is not an abuse.
Corporations would have no incentive to research it. Of course, they don't research any of this now either, so there's no loss. Don't forget, all this "corporate research" is basically patenting the work of grad students at universities who have received federal grants.
What incentive would remain? The ability to manufacture a product in large quantities at your economies-of-scale plant, and sell it at a guaranteed 10%-15% profit. The consistent ability to produce millions of any thing at 100%+ profit margins is indicative of a monopoly. Note thats any THING, not just anything. That type of monopoly can only exist due to artificial scarcity, such as from patents.
The WTO treaty specified that any country can disregard patent laws in issues relating to the health of its citizens, so Rouche can go shove it.
However much this provision may be abused in the future [free dreamcast games are critical to the long term health of our society's hand-eye coordination development
Viagra for example, sells at an 11,000% profit margin on manufacturing cost.
Why not have world goverments doing drug research? It would be beneficial to the people, it would be funded by tax payers, and the medicine would be naturally less expensive, because there are no patents (since it's our goverment and we are paying for it, they don't own it-- we do). They already regulate drug safety. Let's take it a step farther and have them make the drugs.
Just a thought
If we don't provide some sort of protection, there won't be any incentive for people to invest in the first place. Would Roche have devoted the money necessary to Market this drug if anyone who is capable of manufacturing it could do so? Hell no. This drug has saved lives (well, extended them, at least -- which is all any drug can really do). This drug would probably not exist if it weren't for patents. QED...
The actual development of new drugs is highly government funded. So these patents are a very insidiuos form of corporate welfare.
Pharmecuetical companies do invest money in marketing, patenting, middle managment, production, etc. This is mostly low risk.
The profit motive is excellent for physical production. But it breaks down with ideas, and has the opposite effect there.
Companies dont do discovery research... Governements and academics do. The gov't generally is the one funding the reseach done at the university level.
Corporations merely take that tax payer funded public research and apply patents to a process for mass producing it. Those patents are what gives them a monopoly, not research they did on their own.
OOPS! Looks like Roche is gonna pull a lawsuit against the research team that came up with the cure, for making their (Roache) IP worthless.
Roche is basically saying to Brazil "pay what we want you to pay or your people die."
Brazil says "be more reasonable with the price of these drugs or we violate the patent and produce the drugs ourselves."
Who is worse?
The article doesn't say that Brazil is unwilling to pay anything, just that they wanted Roche to be reasonable. The article states the Brazil is complying with agreements with other pharmaceuticals. It seems to me Brazil is willing to compensate the pharmaceuticals as long as they are being reasonable.
A lot of people here are saying this will make the pharmaceuticals stop all research. What will really happen is the pharmaceuticals will be more reasonable when dealing with third world nations which just can't pay outrageous prices for drugs.
Excuse me for not feeling sorry for pharmaceutical giants...
Fascinating statements coming from an Open Source community. "If there's no money in it, there's no reason to do it."
"Put your foot in your mouth enough times and eventually you're going to kick some teeth out."
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Brazil has to buy the equipment too ya know. They're not actually hijacking corporations frigates at sea. They have to buy all the physical equipment as well, so your "lab costs" are a red herring.
Companies dont do discovery research... Governements and academics do. The gov't generally is the one funding the reseach done at the university level.
Corporations merely take that tax payer funded public research and apply patents to a process for mass producing it. Those patents are what gives them a monopoly, not research they did on their own.
If the looneytarians in the crowd will stop screaming bloody murder for five minutes, maybe they'd recognize that this is also a matter of sovereignty. Brazil is one of many countries where AIDS is killing people like the bubonic plague did before the Enlightenment. It is a time of public health emergency, and it is not up to Roche, the US, or anybody else to decide for them. People are dying, and all these arguments about long-term damage are bullshit.
Wise man say, choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them...
I've seen a number of posts stating why violating IP protections with medical r&d is bad in terms of halting future development. The point that people miss is that the drug companies have made a significant amount of money selling AIDS drugs in the US and in other countries that can afford them. I'm not sure if they've recovered their R&D costs entirely, but its a pretty good possibility that they have.
The important distinction to make is that Brazil isn't making their own AIDS drugs because they don't WANT to pay for the legit ones. They are doing so because they CAN'T afford the insanely expensive medications. In reality, I don't think that the drug companies are losing much money because countries like Brazil couldn't afford to buy the drugs at market price anyway. Its not a question of name brand AIDS drugs or cheaper homegrown ones. Its a question of homegrown AIDS drugs or no AIDS drugs.
This is where I think the idea of eminent domain and IP are really important. The drug companies have done a service to the world by creating AIDS drugs that save lives and help slow the epidemic in developing nations. Unfortunately, they are profit-making ventures, and producing those drugs cost money. I agree that they should be compensated for their efforts and expense. However, the first priority should be saving human lives. We should worry about distributing these absoutely neccessary drugs where they are needed first, and about paying the drug companies later. Still, in order to continue development, we need to somehow ensure that the drug companies get compensated. This is where organizations such as the IMF, WTO, UN, and other governmental organizations should foot the bill for the R&D. I think they should develop some policy for seizing the IP of the companies and fairly compensating them for it. At the same time, they need to ensure that it is clearly defined when a country can violate IP. If a country can afford to buy the drugs at fair market prices, they should. Similarly, if a country is financially mismanaged, these organizations need to help these countries develop more stable governments with more sound (and less corrupt) fiscal practices so that they wil some day be able to participate in global markets. Simply burrying countries deeper and deeper in debt (as is the current practice of the IMF) doesn't do anything for the developing nations. The drug companies might not make as much money as they would like, but this way they won't lose money. It might not be totally fair for the companies, but in the end, human life is more important than IP.
As and addendum, some hard asses that have posted are suggesting that the AIDS epidemic is the fault of individuals who participate in unsafe behavior. While this is certainly the case in some instances, particularly given the lack of education in the third world, it is important to note that most of the developing nations with AIDS epidemics have huge pediatric AIDS problems as well. Certainly young children who contract AIDS from their mothers are not responsible for their terrible disease. I think that the interests of children alone provide a good enough warrant for Brazil's actions.
Drug companies make back the R&D on a drug in 3 - 6 months (more often the 3). *All* the rest of the expenses are in marketing ... it's all profit.
The excessive profits of the pharmaceutical industry are protected on one side by the cost of bringing a drug to market (FDA) which reduces competition. On the other side drugs are also patented, which reduces competition.
On the other hand naturally occuring compounds that already exist in nature which may/may not have medicinal value: Asprin, opium, penicillin, caffeine, etc. Would not be produced in todays market, they would never be able to make claims of medicinal value because nobody would fund the FDA trials!
On the other hand the pharmaceutical industry will happily create copy-cat versions of those same drugs which *are* patentable, but often (not aware of any which don't) have mild-to-severe side affects which were not present in the naturally occuring compounds.
*I* think that the government should prop up the University system and Non-profit organizations and allow them to bring non patententable drugs to through FDA trials. This can be done with either grants, or via a not-a-patent-patent that expires when the drug has made it's ROI. I believe that grants would be the preferrable method (more oversight of grant money, as well as grant money only given for research that shows a reasonable liklyhood of being successful. This would improve the state of competition within the industry, as well as our health!.
I wouldn't be making any new AIDS drugs.
Scientists don't work for free. It may sound great to say "Fuck patents, lets take care of people" at first, until you think about it.
Drug companies will stop sending important drugs to places that flaunt their disregard of the law like Brazil. A few AIDS patients may live a little longer, but alot of new antibiotics & other drugs will never make it to Brazil.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
What's so different between R&D'ing software, and then patenting it to protect it, to be able to sell it, and R&D'ing a drug, so you can patent it, and sell it?
Why would anyone bother coding if they can't patent their nice GUI, why bother to do the On Click Buy if the next guy can come and steal it from you?
Ah, you mean you're against software patents, probably because those prevents you from finding a free (as in beer) replacement for this MS shit.. But you don't care about drugs patents, because you'll never be ill, or you'll always be rich enough to pay for you drugs.. Let the poor bastard die, they're useless scum anyway.
did i mention i really don't want to get to know you? :-P
i had a sig, once..
1) Drug companies obviously make too much money if they spend it on advertising and lobbying. All the good, hardworking companies cut such things out to be more competitive.
2) If we take away the profit in developing new drugs, we will net more lives saved. We don't need the billions spent by evil investors primarily motivated by money. New drugs will be developed fast enough through good will that lives will not be lost which could have been saved by faster/better research. This certainly won't compound over the next hundred+ years as disease and sickness evolve, I mean heck, everyone knows evolution is a screwy theory. We probably won't even need any new research.
3) Nationalization of private assets for the good of the whole is a great idea. I mean, if you can't trust your government, who can you trust?
First off, 33% of the $10,000USD annual PER PERSON AIDS drug cocktail isn't going to work in a country where the annual salary is less than $3,333, and over there the pay usually a nickel an hour.
FYI, It costs about $200USD to make the pills.
As for the red herring of "giving them away for free" that referred to ONE BATCH of a drug that required refrigeration - something not available in most of the country it was offered too. The company refused to say what it would charge for the next years supply. DOn't forget... these are TREATMENT drugs... not cures. Treatments drugs need to be taken for the rest of the person's life... whether its six months til they die or 60 year.
Besides...
Companies dont do discovery research... Governements and academics do. The gov't generally is the one funding the reseach done at the university level.
Corporations merely take that tax payer funded public research and apply patents to a process for mass producing it. Those patents are what gives them a monopoly, not research they did on their own.
science is a religion
$82 million is 28% of the AIDS budget of Brazil. This implies Brazil spends $293 million on AIDS.
(I am going to assume in an US centric way that they mean dollars and not reals since I don't want to look up the exchange rate. The article wasn't clear on the point.)
They claim they will save 40% of the drug costs which implies they are either going to let the locals make some cash or the markup Roche is charging is around 66%. Not exactly an obscene percentage on a successful drug that has to carry the freight of every failed drug they researched.
A 40% savings is $33 million in a country with 175 million people and a GDP of $1,000,000,000,000 according to http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0107357.html. That's right. One trillion GDP.
So in order to save 40% of 28% of their entire AIDS budget of $293 million they are going to flout the law and cloak themselves in righteousness to boot.
These guys spend 0.03% of their GDP on AIDS. To actually pay for this medicine they would have to spend 0.033% of their GDP fighting AIDS.
I think respecting IP rights is probably worth 3 one-thousandths of one percent of your GDP.
CAL
I dont like the fact that some people (countries in this case) can do whatever they feel like breaking any rules they see fit.
The patent is there to protect intellectual property. I think it's time to start seeing the drugcompanies for what they are... companies. If people/countries can simply ignore patents, then drugcompanies will simply stop researching new medications.
The Brazil government should be sued for this, and Roche should win. I agree that people's lifes are important, but we have to understand that the rules exist because they have to.
In a perfect world, all medication should be free and no child should go hungry. Sounds really good, but we all know that this is not reality. Unfortunately, we will not reach the perfect world by ignoring rules. We will just end up making it worse. If the Brazil government can ignore patents, why can't the US do the same? The entire Africa is poor and they all have AIDS problems, why can't they ignore every single patent there is for AIDS medication?
We can clearly see here that this is getting out of hand. This cannot and should not be allowed!!
If the Brazil government will get away with this, I should be able to copy MP3's legally. My reasoning for this?
Well, alot of artists I listen to have drugproblems and/or alcohol problems. The ones that don't... well... they are artists... so they will soon enough. By not buying their CD's and thereby not giving them any money, I'm saving their lives.
If multiple companies are creating these drugs, the first one to create a successful cure will crush their competition and their pitful "treatments", and be able to charge more for the cure than the other forms of treatment.
As long as there is competition, developing a cure is a likely.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Somehow the idea of government enforced intellectual property doesn't strike me as quite the libertarian philosophy. Maybe you have decided to overlook that patents and copyrights were deemed a necessary evil only for limited periods and expressly against the wish of Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers.
IP is theft from the people. It was accepted by some of the founding fathers as an exception to the first amendment (free speech). It was not, and is not, universally accepted as proper.
The theory that anything Intellectual can be Property is a far cry from naturally scarce physical goods being Property.
If you want to bring up that old chestnut about pharmaceuticals needing to recover their R&D costs, why not also mention that the typical marketing costs of new drugs are higher than the R&D costs? Surely any truly marvelous new drug would not need such exorbitant marketing.
Why not also wonder at the exorbitant tests necessitated by that non-libertarian entity otherwise known as the FDA, somewhat in self defense against ridiculous lawsuits? Surely there's a lot of money to be saved here in exchange for the small loss that whiners would have to accept some of the risk that a potential life-saving drug might have side effects.
Why not also wonder at those pharmaceuticals who stretch out the patent lifetime with bogus lawsuits against the generic manufacturers?
Why not also wonder at those pharmaceuticals who dream up trivial new uses for those drugs so they can delay the entry of generic equivalents?
Infuriate left and right
Here's an idea. I think patents on chemicals (drugs) are ok, even if I have problems with patents on pure thought (math/software).
:) Imagine that.
What is needed is a compulsory license that lets poor nations produce patented drugs at a rate proportional to their average (or median to keep a few rich people from skewing this) income compared to the rates an industrialized nation would pay. This should probably be scaled up by a factor of 2 or 3 or so, just to keep many nations near the top of the economic ladder paying for the drugs at full price.
It would also give large corporations an incentive to make the rest of the world richer.
Okay, so, Brazil gives IP rights the finger, steals the AIDS drug, and saves 40% of its money, correct? Controversy aside (I think what they're doing is wrong and an agreement should have been reached, but that's not my question), what happens to that 40%? If Brazil is as 'humanitarian' as I suppose it is trying to be with this patent violation, the money would go to health (and general) education, condom distribution, and further research into better AIDS medication. That would be an ideal world. My bet is that it goes to something completely non-related. Like, oh, upgrading the official car fleet, or redecorating the AIDS office headquarters. I want to know if Brazil is doing this to really help people, or just save a buck and get its name in the paper.
Never express yourself more clearly than you think ~Neils Bohr
Sounds great. People die in FDA approved drugs too. At least under this model we'd know why, and be open honest and up front about it. It also sounds like side effects are eliminated pretty quickly under your model. People allergic to peanuts already know to check the label anyway. Their doctor probably knows too. and since DOCTORS are prescribing the drug, a curious hackerish one would have pointed out the mercury in the thermalase(sp?) compound used to keep the drug preserved. You can fix that in the next version, and we all get healthier for pennies on the $100.
All I hear from people is that drug companies wont have the incentive anymore to make drugs if Brazil does this. Here is an extreme simplification as I see it...
1. Damn the patents, people are suffering and dieng. Do what we can to help and do it now before more die.
2. Respect the, and I dont disagree here, rightful patent of the company that researched and developed this drug and let potential untold masses suffer and die while we negotiate fair terms.
Maybe I have it wrong, and I have a very low opinion of where the collective world is headed but lets give it the benefit of the doubt and pool our resources to battle this plaque with every resource we have, not bicker and fight like greedy children.
Incentive? How about watching someone you love die from this horrible disease because they were too poor to pay for the medicine that might have helped them live.
How much better could this world be but for the loss of those might not have had to die?
Curtis Myers
Is it not possible that this sort of patent infringement could have the undesirable effect of dissuading companies from disclosing inventions for patent review?
Income from patents which cure disease and ease suffering in some of the poorest parts of the world is nothing short of blood money.
At least the Brazilian government had the option of infringing on this patent. In the not too distant future, maybe even this will be denied by money-sucking corporations intent upon hoarding their intellectual property to the detriment of those for whom it is most needed.</anti-capitalism>
Si
--
"things... can only get better..." - some pop song
While I agree that the people who develop such drugs deserve compensation, not a single life should be lost in the name of a buck.
Interesting point, but exactly how many commercials have you seen that advertise an AIDS medicine?
Haven't you noticed that the open source companies is-not-doing-so-great? Filing for bancruptsy is a bad thing you know.
This is not at all a issue about money over lives. It's about do we want more drugs in the future or don't we?
i guess "Big Pharma" must be stopped at all costs!! they are greedy bastards!!
well not really. Brazil is more concerned about saving money than actually saving lives. Drug companies do 500x more to save lives than any government. But they do need money to support and fund research, as well as make a profit.
Companies dont do discovery research... Governements and academics do. The gov't generally is the one funding the reseach done at the university level.
Corporations merely take that tax payer funded public research and apply patents to a process for mass producing it. Those patents are what gives them a monopoly, not research they did on their own.
EXAMPLE: (ripped from post#2208214)
Here at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, they helped to develop and owns some of the patents for the AIDS drug Ziagen, which was then licensed to GlaxoSmithKline. This is one of the drugs involved in the patent suit in South Africa earlier ths year.
It's about time someone did this; I mean, what is the point in follwing rules when they are made by braindead Neanderthals in the first place.
Just wait until Nanotechnology comes into the picture...there won't be ANY intellectual property to whine about. This is definitely a step in the right direction.
Now if someone would come up with a way to get rid of the monetary system, that would be something to really rejoice over.
Well, then, if you heard it on National Proletariat Radio, it must be true!
Since countries are signatories to IP laws and can sign out of them, your plaint begs the question of whose laws apply. The pharmaceutical companies develop drugs based on US and European laws for the US and European markets. They have no right to dictate the laws of other countries - if Brazil passes a law that gives Brazilians the right to reverse-engineer any drugs they need to, perhaps they will face trade sanctions when they try to export them, but they certainly have every right to pass that law.
"There aint no money in a cure!!! They just want you to be able to live with it. Twenty years from now, youll be calling into work 'no, I cant make it in today, my AIDS is acting up'"
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
All of the drugs that are currently being used to treat AIDS are expensive, but for a very good reason. The expensive part about the drug indrustry is not (usually) the making of the drug, but rather all the years of research that go into figuring out which drug to make. That company has probably been devoting research into this for 10-15 years, and just now have a halfway decent solution, which is still far from an actual cure. To find an actual cure may take another 10-15 years, or even longer, and that requires a whole lot more money. Where do you think this money comes from? Certianly not the government of Brazil.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Hurm...what really bothers me is that a bunch of people are saying "This is bad! Where is the modivation for pharma company to do R&D now?!"
I am way to young to know what polio was. My grandparents tell me it was a pretty scary thing but thanks to one guy and his research team polio is very preventable and contained. I was under the impression Jonas Salk did his research into polio vacines not because there was money to be had but because polio was a nasty crippling disease. I could be wrong though...
Is it too much to expect people to look in to the cure for AIDS because they think the world would be a better place without such a horrible thing around? Do people really have that much faith in big company's bottom lines to drive R&D to cure AIDS and other nasty disease?
It might not be in the 'States and/or Europe, but in Africa it certainly is (and I gather in South America as well). I've heard estimates that over 70% of the people living in Nairobi are infected. President Moi even suggested that Kenyans should simply abstain from sex altogether to try and get this under control.
some random thoughts.o nomy/DebtTribunal.html , and get a clue.
- Are u SURE that Brasil (how rich a country we have there, indeed..) can afford to pay the "fair" price for the drug? obviously you haven't researched a bit. try for example http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/brazil/ec
- now we can be allowed to think that Brazil can't pay for *grossly overpriced* drugs, what were they supposed to do? Sit down and die? or grab it and run? Maybe ask nicely? they did, they were told "no".
- "2. Reduces the possibility of region specific drugs NOT being developed because companies rightfully fear losing all investment. (some diseases are more prevalent in certain areas of the world - that is an obvious statement)."
Hey you know what?
companies DON'T develop regional treatments. NO big company research, say, Malaria. So i guess it can't get worse, uh?
"Apparently people are willing to allow those with the guns to do it, and not realize its the first step to losing their own rights." yup, let's all listen carefully to those drugs giants saying: you didn't pay, you're gonna die. and be nice with them, they didn't really mean it, did they?
i had a sig, once..
I don't care how much it costs to make a drug (research and all), if you can save (or extend) just one human life by breaking a patent, just one life, you are totally justified in breaking the patent
And then when Roche decides to go out of business, then what? What about the thousands or millions of lives lost that would have been saved by future revolutionary drugs that they may have gotten had Roche developed it in the future?
Such short-sightedness is what is killing this country, and apparently now, the world.
Also, RTFA's and see what Brazil was paying as opposed to everyone else. They werent being price "guaged" (or gouged if you speak English).
Rants are fine. Just be sure your soapbox isnt an empty cardbord box.
Brothers and sisters, AIDS is our problem. It makes the bubonic plague look like a bad case of hiccups.
You sound like someone who was afraid to sit next to Ryan White during the ignorant 80s. Last time I checked, the Plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, and spread through fleas, coughs, sneezes, and other easily communicated methods. AIDS, to the best of my knowledge, can only be spread through sexual transmission and direct exposure to infected blood; it is significantly more difficult to acquire. This is why a majority of the population still treats this disease with relative apathy; they avoid it by the very nature of their lifestyles.
This isn't to say that I think situations like that of Africa and many other third-world countries doesn't need to be solved _now_. There is a difficult road to pave by grassroots education campaigns, volunteering, and the like. The easy, unfair way to defeat AIDS is by hijacking the pharms, a solution that may come back to haunt these would-be heroes.
I would answer your fireman analogy by saying that if enough people purposely light their curtains on fire just to see them glow, the local counsel will disband the fire department before there's even a chance to steal one truck.
If you are born from a mother with aids, how is that the baby's fault?
If you are car-jacked, and the guy, sticks a needle in your arm, how is that your fault? (Yes, its happened before)
If you are a nurse, and you get pricked with a contaminated needle, how is that your fault?
If you get a blood transfusion from contaminated blood, how is that your fault? (And if you think that 100% of the blood is safe, and the tests are fool-proof, then, well... good luck to you)
If you take precautions and use a condom, how is that your fault? What, you think its 100% effective? Oh, you should've known? What if the other person doesn't know either? Or what if they didn't tell you? How is that your fault?
Also, last time I checked, there is no such thing as a "world government", hence laws in other countries do not apply to other countries. Though, governments would like to think otherwise...ie If something is trademarked in USA, and a company in Timbaktu is using it, do you think they give a rip? Just look at Nike... They were not allowed to provide uniforms/equipment in the 1992 Summer Olympics because either Nike or the swoosh, (I forget which), is already a trademark in Spain. You think that will make Phil Knight change the name of the company or logo, in the USA? Heeeeeeeeell no!
etc etc etc
Since I have inside facts regarding this (I must post as AC) I'm gonna respond to this one.
The problem is the following.
Some have said that much research is made by taxdollar, thats true. But this is a different kind of research, it aims as general understanding of the body and the processes that is has. This research IS important but you cannot compare it to the development of a specific drug.
Say you discover a possible way to cure a decease. This is often the result from expensive research that is made blindly, you don't know what you are looking for. This costs lots of money.
Normally there are three stages of clinical trials to establish if (1) it works (2) is safe.
To make those clinical trials (and those are required to be allowed to sell the substance ofcause) you must have LOTS of researchers, we are talking about houndreds around the globe. Not only do you pay for this people but also for their equipment and so on.
It may sound insainly expensive for you but the fact remains that it DO often cost billions of dollars to develop a new drug. If you take a look at the companies we talk about here not all of them makes a profit at all, some takes losses. This is not because they are "greedy" and "charge way to much", if it was so they would have huge profits.
So, if you want new cancer, parkinson and aids drugs to be developed this kind of money just have to be made on sales. There is no way anyone is going to pay say one billion for researching something that others then steal.
It amuses me to see people talking about drug companies and the money used for research, etc. I have several doctor friends who are *constantly* wooed by the drug companies, since they started doing their residencies, with big parties, etc. These are not "rent a hotel room" deals either but swanky parties at very expensive restaurants. I'll start feeling bad about drug companies losing money over something like this when they're not pulling shit like I mentioned above. Its sick that people cant get meds they need in this day and age but drug companies have no problems with throwing expensive parties to get doctors to use their drugs.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Since he believes in total freedom, he surely endorses both the posting of this publicly available information, my request for you to call him, and my desire to post this anonymously.
If a 1 time injection (ew, needles, make that pill) vaccine to prevent the catching of aids, and every other STD, plus influenza was invented, would you be angry if governments stole it ten years after it was invented and gave it free to everyone in the world? To beg the question, lets pretend that a corporation actually did all the reseach and tests and fact finding for every bit leading up to it (which, technically, is impossible, but lets pretend.)
If not, welcome ot the days of free love and less sexual uptightness on the part of the conservative.
Or would you rather have millions die?
Personally, I don't really care about millions dying. There are too many people already. But I do care that someone I know (and like) might be hurt.Since I _do_ have people I care about, I place THEIR individual rights above that of any patent law. If necessary, I would burglarize a drug store to get that miracle pill to save whomever I love.
To simplify the IP issue even further, lets pretend we're on the Enterprise' and have replicators. If the replicator has no food models, and you have a patented food model you could (unlawfully) program in to prevent both yourself and whomever you care about in this life from starving what would you do?
Note I didn't ask if it was reasonable or likely to occur, only, _if placed in that scenario with no way out_ what would you do?
If you would stoically starve slowly to death, and condemn your fellows to do the same because "it's the law" I think you should think further. Think about if a vote was taken by the 3 people on a deserted island that someone needed to be eaten, and you lost the vote 2-1. Would you, for the sake of unaninimity, change your vote and make it 3-0? Or would you defend yourself, or would you take your chances with the sea? Either way, you break the law or you die.
.. for your english grammer/spelling.
>Now they are using a public health problem as an excuse to void a valid international patent because they did not get the agreement they wanted.
If there is any reason why to break an patent wouldn't this be it? "I'm sorry you have to die/suffer, but there are international patent laws to uphold."
>White farmers losing their property in Zimbabwe, because its not fair that they have it.
Not the same thing. This example has one group both fighting for property and the ability to work. The Brazil situation has one group wanting to make money and another dying/suffering.
>Basically Brazil breaks the agreed internation law and makes the stuff for free, thereby forcing other nations to either follow their example of pay the difference.
Wrong. Roche will not make the pills. Brazil does. If I produce pills in my basement, besides lost potential sales, it costs Roche NOTHING. Unless their accounting department are counting on every HIV patient as revenue, this will never show up in their bottom line.
>Reduces the possibility of region specific drugs NOT being developed because companies rightfully fear losing all investment.
No... as long as it happens somewhere in the world there will be drugs produced. Because it will spread to richer nations and there is more profit off of rarer conditions. (Because if you get it, you HAVE to pay for it and the drug companies can charge anything they want). And most of these "regions" are already poor. They can't afford expensive drugs right now. Remember Brazil?
>Raises spectre of loss of intellectual property on other levels, and more and more are confiscated for the "public good"
Welcome to the real world. Wars have broken out for the "public good". Oppression of miniorites have been due to the "public good". The artifical patent rights of some company is pretty minor compaired to this.
>Increases the likelyhood of similar industries leaving "hostile" countries furthering the problem that country faces.
Thats the risk each individual country takes. Don't see what the problem is. Its a simple pro/con thing. Obviously Brazil thinks its worth it.
>Who can judge what is a fair price for something?
Like human suffering? Thats the question Brazil had answered.
>Apparently people are willing to allow those with the guns to do it, and not realize its the first step to losing their own rights.
What does this have to do with anything? Where does guns come into a patent dispute between a company and a country? Talk about a wild tangent.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Here are the facts:
Many people ARE dying of AIDS in brazil. And the world
Brazil DID try to come to an agreement with the swiss patent holder, lik eit HAD done with anoither patent holder, to try to lower the price. ( yes people, it is commong practice for there to be different prices for different sections of the world, it's called economics)
If brazil has an AIDS problem, the world has an aids problem... AIDS is a mutating and transmitable decease.. guess whow it got spread around in the first time. So it is in the world's best intesrest to deal with this.
:-P
Yes i believe pharmaceuticals working on aids drugs should get their right compensation, but i think the issue in this is much bigger. I believe that global govt's should be involved in this. There should be some sort of collaboration into fighting this, and more affordable drugs, maybe thru global financing, is definetely a way to go. Face it, this has long turned into a WORLD crisis...
Unfotunately, since no real solutions or global colaborations are indeed in place ( they are all basically being planed, proposed). This is turned
into a case of Stealing foor for survival... LITERALLY
This is not a clear case... it's as grayer a case as you can get...
Just my opinion... Of course am right.
I think it is quite clear that a human life is not of infinite value to the public, nor to any individual.
The life-threatening risks we take everyday (for the sake of saving some $) discredits the argument that saving "one life" justifies stealing from another. (Do you drive a car? Is it the safest you can buy? If not, why?)
Poor has always been, and always will be, a relative term. *Everyone* is poor in one aspect or another. If being poor were to justify stealing, we'd all be thieves in a chaotic society ruled by those with more coersive power. Although you may disagree, this is not how we live today.
Human behavior is driven by incentives, which in all cases I can think of is linked to profit (not just in $ terms - think about happiness, love, even exercise). Drug companies (and their employees) operate in a world of trade, in which currency has been introduced to make the way we go about exchanging our goods and services more efficient (bartering and the double-coincidence of wants never worked too well). Accordingly, these companies (and their employees) are motivated by $ profits, which, I must say, if a very reasonable thing, because developing drugs is a very, very, very costly venture.
The profits earned from one drug do not simply cover the costs of developing that same drug. Pharmaceutical companies are constanting failing in their attempts to find treatments and cures for our ailments. A failed attempt costs just as much as a successful one.
Take away the drug companies' incentives, and their development efforts will most definitely go away. And no one, and I mean no one, benefits in that case.
Explain to me please, why she is a culprit, not a victim.
I'm looking forward to your reply.
Oh please, DOS is hardly an OS by todays standards. No multitasking, no memory protection. Technically it's an OS, just like a T Ford technically is a car.
And yes, there are a lot of free (beer) RTOS's, they are hardly easy to develop though. If OS's were easy to develop would it have taken the Open Source community so long to make GNU/Linux and the surrounding software (GNOME,KDE, window manageers etc.) this long to be developed.
Now the big benefit of programming is that it's rather cheap and easy for a layman to do it on their freetime. It's not like you're likely to do some molecular biology research in the basement.
If more areas had developed in the same way as Open Source then the world would be a much better place for a lot of people.
...but you only addressed one of many points the parent poster made. What about the other points? Keep trying, and in the meantime, make an effort to remember that AIDS is a disease, and not just a social issue.
Virg
Brazil spends a large share of their
public health budget in that drug alone.
They have tried to negotiate with Roche
to lower prices without success.
But of course, as a self centric american,
you have no clue of what happens outside your
own country and give more value to gross profit
than human lives, especially from such third world countries...
So does this mean that two wrongs DO make a right?
I would also argue that you are a childish idiot, since you see fit to use such tactics since you disagree with me, rather than actually trying to formulate an argument. Are you, perhaps, a scientologist? Maybe your brave and righteous action will prompt someone to find a way to do something really harmful to me -- but that would certainly not prove me wrong!
Anyone who wishes to call, write, or visit may certainly do so! I just hope not in a harassing manner. :)
-Omar, PS: good job decoding my .sig.
I've been reading the arguments back and forth about this issue. Some people think that lives are sacred and hence breaking the (IP) law is OK. Others say that the ends does not justify the means and other arguments.
Well *forget* the morality of the issue and look at it from a practical viewpoint. If countries are going to break international law to distribute medicine, then what reason will drug companies have to find cures or even treatments to these diseases? None. As it is, a cure is completely unprofitable to large drug companies because Brazil and other 3rd world countries who can't develop or afford it themselves would simply "pirate" it. But they will suffer come the next great epidemic. The drug companies will ignore the big diseases because they are not profitable, instead they will stick to the profit centers of headache/pain relief and fat reducing drugs. IOW drugs that don't save lives but only make you feel better *without actually helping anyone*.
don't confuse things too much.
it definitely is stealing.
however, the grey area is in the ethics. ie, 'is it ethical to steal food for hunger?', or, in this case - 'is it ethical to break patent law for humanitarian reasons?'
phrased in that way, i agree with you. saving human life outweighs monetary concerns.
i know it's kind of nitpicky, but i think it's important to note the distinction.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Carpet bombing? Yeah, that's very smart.
...stop developing drugs no one will ever pay you for
Which this is of course not a case of. All rich countries, where they no doubt make at least 95% of their profit, will still pay full price for their drugs.
While many people have pointed out that the R&D needs to be compensated, and it is expensive, I must say a few things. For one, it is, but like all companies wanting to recoup something, they are claiming more then it really is. Sure it may have cost a billion to develop, but when they claim it cost 10 billion, something is highly askew. Others have mentioned they can get the money back from rich companies, and others counter that argument that people will just get the drugs in Brazil. I find that hard to believe. However, even so, to be honest, very *few* people could ever afford the drugs on their own to begin with. So whats the solution? More public research and government *produced NOT funded* factories. Why? Because they can be held more accountable then any multi-national and it can directly help the people and not worry about bottom lines.
I see loads and loads of comments here in support of the medicine company that either bashes or seriously questions Brasil's decision in this matter. I also see how their comments are given high moderation points for their insightfullness and I also see flaws in their reasoning and logic.
I therefore thinks it's time for a reality check and discuss some FACTS before we start to take sides:
1.Quite some comments says or hints that Brasil is breaking "international laws". Wake up. There is no international body declaring international laws. What Brasil is breaking is international AGREEMENTS on how to treat patents. Brasil is in their full right to break this agreement if they discover that it costs more and gives less than they anticipated. That the medicine company is crying "foul" is just to be expected, but their handling of this situation really asked for it.
2. How much of the medical research is actually financed by medical corporations that rely on patents for their income? I have no real statistics, but I remember reading that here in Sweden around half of the funding of cancer research is financed by "Cancerfonden" that gathers donations (from government, companies and individuals) for cancer research. Add to that all funding done by institutions as universities and hospitals and you find that commercial medical research is in the minority. Remember, this is in Sweden where we have an unproportionally big medicine industry compared to our population.
3. Remember that patents isn't just a protection of your discovery, it also blocks your competition from inovating along the same branch! Patents both rewards and stiffles inovation from time to time. There is no proof whatsoever that the patent system has led to a higher rate of innovation in any field ever. We have just followed a logical string of thoughts and reasonings to come to the conclusion that patents do increase inovation. This reasoning is built on the assumption that we have a mostly correct perception of the world.
4. People here are commenting on how patents affect a business that they don't know anything about. Many falls into making the same kind of generalisation that we constantly have to defend ourselves against, that patents are good and drive inovation and that there would be much less inovation without it. We know that it isn't true for software development. How can you state it as a truth for another industry that also differs a lot from normal mechanical innovation without really knowing anything about that industry?
5. Doesn't the fact that we are forced to chose between peoples lives and getting money to future research that will save peoples lives tell you that something is wrong with the system? We need competition and rewards to get research in medicine, but we don't need the blocking (in both research and applying the results) that the patent system gives.
There are other ways to raise funding, encourage competition and give rewards than just applying the patent system. Isn't it time we take a look at some other possible sollutions now that we clearly can see that the patent system doesn't work as it should in the medical field?
If the system is broken, then fix it...
Case in point: A nurse brings in her mother who is HIV positive, but is brought in for something different (which very well could have been complicated or caused by the HIV infection's immune system destruction). When gathering a patient history for the patients benefit this little fact is ommitted. Later, another nurse is stuck (but thankfully turns out negative) and then bloodwork is ordered and found that the patient was indeed HIV positive. When the daughter (again, a nurse) is confronted about this, she gets very hateful, vehement and abusive while yelling (yes, yelling) that it was 'none of their business'. When the doctor asked how a nurse could completely disregard the safety of the patient and the staff due to ego and pride, disregarding the privacy policies in place, she just got more vehement. So, it was easy to see that her superficial and emotional security was more important than her mothers or the staffs life.
Another case involved AIDS education. It has long been known, that due to the very nature of the HIV virus (uhhh, yes I know it is redundant), that there were certain activities, locations and conditions that increased the probability of infection. For example, rubbing open wounds together is rather high, while touching a 'normal' (non bleeding or wounded) person is very low. Anyway, because the rectum is designed by nature to absorb, it is VERY high on the list when considering sexual vectors. However, the liberals (read: hypocrits who cared NOTHING about helping the sick and reducing the cases... education, logic, reason and compassion are antithesis to a liberals) anyway, the liberals picketed, vandalized, etc until that was removed. So, typical to the liberal credo of 'if it feels good do it, no matter what the consequence' and 'ignorance is bliss' created a situation where people were NOT EDUCATED. Far be it for someone to have usefull information in order to make an informed decision, they would rather have it filtered from them or would rather lash out at reality for the choices they make. I suppose if I smoke and it is proven it is dangerous then I will lash out at the facts and the messenger. Oh wait! Then I can sue everyone and me and my relatives can now be independantly wealthy.
Well, perhaps the wording should have been virtually no progress. One vaccine in several decades does after all put them somewhat behind the curve in medical research.
Bully on them for that vaccine, tho'.
Virg
I'll do one better. I'll name two:
Competition will keep the prices fair and reasonable. It may take longer to recover an expensive R&D development, but it is recoverable.
Oh, and ad homonem attacks aside (where does Star Trek or television come into any of this, other than your absurd stereotyping?) I may have given you credit for more intelligence than you deserved (the above two scenerios would count as fairly obvious to me, and a number of others have occurred to me with a little thought, but for which I do not have time to enumerate as I have to get back to work), but that hardly makes the point I made "absurd" by any definition.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"None of the companies who currently hold patents on them were actually involved in doing the research that generated the drug and demonstrated it's initial efficacy."
THAT IS FALSE.
Go search on google.com for the history behind the drugs. All the current protease inhibitors we're invented at companies. Not by the govt.
This may not be true for AZT, the compound which was found (as an anti-cancer therapy that turned out to have too many side effects) under a govt. grant back in the 60's before AIDS was known. BUT, it was a private corporation Burroughs Wellcome that first found that the AZT compound was effective against AIDS.
Just go look up the patent on a drug (type in its real name) on
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
It will show who the original INVENTORS are by name and where they worked (Assignee refers to the ORIGINAL not current). Here are some to try out.
Zidovudine (AZT/ZDV)
Stavudine (d4T)
Didanosine (ddI)
Inclinavir (crixivan)
Zalcitabine (ddC)
Ritonavir (Norvir)
Lamivudine (3TC/Epivir)
Nelfinavir (viracept)
Saquinavir (Invirase)
Nevirapine (Viramune)
We can sell the drug.
Why make the cure?
We can sell drugs over and over, but once we sell a cure, we're out of buisness.
I don't see alot of people making money off polio anymore...
Another thing that is tired about this argument is that is always seems to be ok to do anything if it involves AIDS. Brazil gives away free drugs to anyone with AIDS. Do they give free treatment to anyone with cancer, TB, or even other STDs? I know that AIDS is 100 fatal, but they are talking about a lot of money to slow down the progression of a disease that is preventible in the first place. Curing cancer actually saves the person's life and a person's personal actions may or may not contribute to cancer.
While living in Brazil I often wondered whether alcohol-based fuel was really cleaner. Instead of using corn (as we try to in the USA) they use cane sugar to produce the alcohol.
Burning the cane field is part of the harvesting process. It removes the leaves making the cane easier to handle. It also covers everything within a mile in ashes. It was always a joy to come home and find my laundry on the line covered in soot.
Does anyone know how polluting it is to burn the fields?
As a side note, many Brazilians that I met felt that alcohol-powered cars were inferior. They were VERY hard (if not impossible) to start when it was cold (not very often where I was) and the exhaust smelled like a frat party.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Lots of people having been complaining about how unfair this is to big corportions
"But think of the mega-Corporations" does not have the same rings a "But think of the children".
You really have to decide what your priorities are, put the good of society and _real_ people ahead of personal/corporate profit and greed.
Some have suggested that this will harm research and development. That is highly amusing to hear in the same forum where people regularly mock the statement "Non would write software for free".
If you still dont think that people will do R&D (or make art/write programs) unless they are getting paid then i strongly recommend you watch Lorenzos Oil. The film is a great and deeply moving true story.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0104756
http://www.myelin.org/index2.html
[i wish slashdot would automagically turn properly formed URL into links]
[posting as AC so as to avoid obliterating my Moderating to this story. I think its a stupid rule and i should be able to mod (up) any comments except my own]
If you're going to be making billions off selling your drug, you can spend millions researching it... This is what you guys are upset about. Loss of patents = loss of money so no one trys anymore...
Thats good, if you want to sell people drugs. If you want to maximize money coming in, you should sell them drugs they need to buy as often as possible...
Kinda like planed obsolecence... or when your mechanic breaks stuff in your car as he fixes it... Or like kiemotherapy, how it puts cancer in remission, but since you have radioactive dye, you'll be back in the hospital...
Where is the incentive for making a cure to AIDS, or cancer? If you make a cure, you put tens of thousands of people out of a job. Do you think the AIDS drug industry wants to find a cure? Research to cure diseases should be federally funded, not designed by the corrupt private sector.
Remember the thing that people would sell you air if they could restrict your access to it? Same thing is happening with researching drugs vs a cure.
Break all the patents, patents suck. We need a new way of looking of dealing with the wrongs of capitalism... Intellectual property or trade secrets, planned obsolecence, and competition that breeds evil... Definately need to be addressed.
God spoke to me
Ahem, just because "some" people are willing to work for "nothing", does not mean it is a feasible OR a superior means of satisfying society's needs. The Open Source movement hardly answers even a MERE fraction of today's software, and the costs of R&D are almost laughable in comparison, not to mention the SLOW development times. Did you know that: The average drug costs 600million dollars to bring to market today (almost all of the costs are incurred in DEVELOPMENT, not research). While this figure does include the drugs that never make it to market, it does not take into account several other extremely powerful issues. For one, the average time to market (development & approvals time) is almost 15 years long today--that's an EXTREMELY tough position to be in financially. Secondly, of those drugs that make it to market, only a small fraction actually BREAK EVEN on total R&D costs (Hint: This does not even include marketing costs).
The drugs companies are VERY much dependent on a few "hit" drugs to offset the R&D costs for ALL other efforts (not just that one drug).
So to answer your two assertions:
First, poor countries' appropriation of these few successful drugs may MAKE future R&D efforts for ALL drugs specific to those regions economically unfeasible [even for a non-profit!!], not just this one AIDS drug. Brazil et. al is capping the only upside [even to break even alone], while doing nothing to relieve the downside and the risk.
Second, Open Source style development of drugs is an absolute and complete joke. Almost all of drug prices are the result of REAL costs. [Profit is a relatively small component of it, especially when it is adjusted for risk.] There is a world of difference between a LOOSE handfull of hackers around the world working PART TIME on a little code here and there for fun and the challenge, and that that is required to get a drug off the ground. It requires a vastly different mindset, not to mention a great deal of resources(The great costs still must be shouldered by society, minus a little bit of profit). You also can't ignore the time involved and the relative lack of reward per dollar/time/etc.
No, government MIGHT be able to manage it, but not a bunch of people poking around. However, it'd still cost society just as much money, maybe even more. Those costs may be borne out more evenly if government does it, but that's also kind of the point of insurance/HMOs (in theory).
Anyways, you miss the point, MIGHT != IS. If GNU/GPL/Whatever can do it cheaper and better and faster, let them. But until that time, only ONE system (IP + profit) really delivers; don't break it just because you have a theory.
Using Fortune 1000 data.
"But a closer look reveals that drug companies aren't all that profitable when compared to many other companies. According to Fortune, the median profit of the 12 drug companies included was 18 percent in 1999. Most of the companies were in the 15 to 20 percent range.
By contrast, Nabisco reported a 36 percent profit for that year. And for most of the 1990s, Coca-Cola had higher profits than the median drug company. Yet no one accuses Coca-Cola and Nabisco of price gouging on soft drinks and cookies.
Even Gannett, publisher of USA Today, made 17 percent in 1999 -- right up there with the drug companies."
Maybe my dad's restaurant should ship food over to Africa, because his profit margin is as good to better than the average drug company!
Or try this sites:
http://www.yourdoctorinthefamily.com/commentary
We cannot forget that it may create some impact, mainly in researches and making of new medicines.
Im from Brazil and I really dont see the government investing seriously in researches. I think they have the right to break the copyrights (I think thats right), but they cannot just hold on techonogy not created by them (Ok, created by billionarie company, but the innovation is their). They should help develpment intead of making high expenses with futile things (and some imoral, like paying the bill of bankrupt companies).
The Swiss Guard are coming. You don't want to end up on the business end of a halberd, do you?
Thats 2d6. Or 2d8, I forget...
"We want your money".
Funny how they don't mention that, isn;t it. It's always something like
"We think of YOU first"
or
"Making the world a better place"
I can understand governments spending millions in research money to study and attempt to cure cancer, and the rest of the serious diseases, but AIDS does not qualify. AIDS is not airborne, does not get transfered through touch, and does not spread in the ground water. It is does not really qualify as a health threat since you can decide not to get it. There are pratically no cases of people getting aids through infected blood transfusions, or getting it from parents. While it does happen, the huge majority decided they wanted to participate in risky behaviour, more than they wanted to live. I think that decision should be honored, and they should be reminded of their decision when they go begging for a cure.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Look, the lives of the people who are saved are far more important than the fucking profit made by drug companies. Drug companies ALWAYS recapture the R&D cost if their drug is worth shit, and if its worth something, they always make a profit, so hence their is motivation to develop. What drug companies want is to make 100 times the R&D cost. Now, drug companies to NOT need to make 100X the cost of R&D to be motivated to product cures. In fact, 1.5X or 2X is more than enough.
For those of you not familiar with simple economics, be aware that just because a company is not making a profit -- or maybe if its losing money -- does not mean it stops making its product. In fact, companies will continue to operate and innovate when they are LOSING money, because the cost of going out of business would be greater than the cost of continuing business. That is, if they went out of business, they would lose even more money than they would if they continued business. Hence, they continue operating.
Now, Brazil has NO obligation whatsoever to consider the IP "rights" of corporations. Their ONLY obligation is to consider what is best for their citizens. Nor does Brazil have any reason or obligation to obey international law or international agreements if it finds these to be at the expense of its citizens. International laws are a violation of the sovereignty of the people of nations anyways.
That said, other governments should and may do the same thing when they deem it necessary, including the US government. Remember, the GOVERNMENT and NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS donate LARGE sums of money to corporations. We should either demand that they make their products freely available to the government, or with-hold funding. The money of the US taxpayers -- PUBLIC MONEY -- should not go towards making a privatized resource.
Finally, let me state that though Brazil's decision is right, their implementation of it is flawed. Brazil needs to accumulate a vast storage of many different HIV-inhibiting/destroying drugs. They then need to treat their patients with all of them simultaneously. This may seem rather calculating but it is necessary. No one "cure" or "blocking mechanism" for HIV will work. HIV is a virus and it evolves rapidly. Any given drug to destroy HIV will destroy maybe 99.99% of HIV viroid particles, but there will always be a few left. So you need to use different drugs simulatneously. there may be billions of HIV viroids within an infected individual, all of them slightly different and mutated, some which have mutations which make them more immune to drugs. You need to treat the patient with enough drugs so that it is improbable that even ONE HIV viroid will be resistant. This means accumulating 10, 20, 30, or even up to a 100 different treatments and using them all at once.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
They honor patents on new drugs but on the older ones they have figured out a great way to get them for cheap:
- They reverse engineer the drug.
- They figure out how much it would cost them to manufacture it themselves.
- They approach the drug companies and say, "We can make this drug for $x. We are not obligated to honor the patent. How much are you willing to sell it to us for?"
- Drug companies figure they can either sell the drug to them for cheap and still make a profit or lose the market.
- So now Brazil is either buying the drug from the drug company for cheaper than they would otherwise be or they are making it themselves.
They can't do it on drugs that were patented since they joined the WTO or they will get kick out. This strategy might come back to haunt them when the drug companies decide to jack up prices for Brazil for new drugs in order to get back at them.Lasers Controlled Games!
Einstein had several children; A girl named Liserl (supposedly retarded and put up for adoption), and two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard (the latter also being mentally unstable and institutionalized).
http://www.usd.edu/~aelverud/advcomp/albert.html
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
No, this world already is shit. It is shit because people like yourself feel you have some God given right to ideas and information. You would rather see millions die than let a country "steal" "IP".
Anyone who has not grown up with the whole idea of IP being forced down their throat would call that insane.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
There are several companies making aids drugs.
What makes you think that the drug companies' patents SHOULD be able to be enforced internationally? The entire world does not consist of one government; there still are borders if you hadn't noticed. If Brazil thinks that the idea of patents on pharmaceuticals is becoming harmful to their society, they have a right to decide not to participate. It's as simple as that.
There's nothing to keep a government from funding malaria research, and freely licensing the result.
Except campaign contributions: "If you publicly fund this research and then give it to ME, you'll get more money to help you get elected." Happens all the time.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Many of the comments on this story remind me of the fact that so many people on the Net describe themselves as libertarian in nature (or something close to it), except when it comes to something they want that belongs to someone else.
Example: Pharma patent rights. A true libertarian would say that, for the durations of their patents, pharma companies have the right to license their creations at any price they choose, or even not at all. $1/dose, $10,000/dose, or "we're not selling" would all be valid. Instead, we get Slashdotters arguing that drug companies should be forced to give away their creations, or to sell them at a "fair" price (i.e., a price not determined by the free market).
Example: Music distribution. A true libertarian would say that, subject to their owning the copyright, record labels have the right to license songs however and to whomever they wish. If they want to license a song so that listeners can enjoy it every other Tuesday, then that's their right. Instead, we get Slashdotters arguing that record labels should be forced to distribute their songs on standardized, "fair" terms (i.e., terms not determined by the free market).
If you want to believe that the government has a role in all this sort of stuff, and should have this kind of power, that's fine, though I'm not on your side. But don't come crying to Slashdot when the government uses all its wisdom and power to tell you what you can do with your computer and your Internet connection. To argue for freedom of speech on the one hand and government control of private intellectual property on the other is intellectually dishonest at best.
-- Frank
have you noticed that the non open source companies aren't doing so great? come up with a more compelling reason.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
This of course assumes that these profit claims are true - why should we trust them? The SA court case clearly demonstrated that the pharmaceutical industry has lied about every aspect of their finances. It was very clear that this industry is totally corrupt.
The drug companies' argument is in essence a defense of high profits. Even in the United States, the cost of drugs is provoking questions about whether continued research and development really depends on giving companies a 20-year monopoly to charge whatever price they choose, especially since they are often marketing other people's discoveries. The manufacturers generally spend twice as much on marketing and administration as they do on research and development.
Something seems to be wrong with patent's law. We are talking about human lives, don't we?
Here a New York Times article with a bit more information. This is apparenty pretty standard procedure in Brazil.
P -B razil-AIDS-Drugs.html?searchpv=aponline
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/A
There are a couple of very key differences in this situation:
;)
1) The ABM treaty is an agreement between STATES, and thus, an implied agreement between the people in those states (the state speaking for the people) A corporation does not speak with the voice of a people; it is an artificial entity to enable individuals to make money.
States are responsible to the people they represent. Corporations are responsible to no-one.
Unilaterally breaking a treaty is to thus break with a people - and is a far more serious kettle of fish.
States appropriate private property (for the good of the state) all the time. Usually, it's compensated for, but not always.
2) As a practical matter, a drug company has little it can do in form of retaliation. A state, however (especially a nuclear state) is not so limited. There may be serious repecussions to breaking the ABM treaty.
In many cases, unilateral treaty-breaking can be seen as an act of war. In the best of cases, it's not very damned polite.
Breaking this _particular_ treaty also has strategic implications. If one believes that an effective missile shield can be erected, then one who has missiles, but no shield, had best strike BEFORE the shield is in place.
Thankfully, the current Russian government seems to have more sense than that. I'm not sure that is univerally applicable to all nuclear powers.
By continuing on its current course of action, the current administration is walking a very thin line. It's not at all a simple case of "erect shield, protect Americans". It's more like "attempt to erect shield, piss off all other nuclear powers, invite first strike, further reputation as a treaty-breaking country not to be trusted" A military success perhaps, but a diplomatic disaster.
It would be far, FAR better to negotiate a new ABM treaty that allowed the new system (having one's cake and eating it too) than to just go ahead and build it anyway.
I'd point out that the last major Western power to ignore the terms of major military treaties and do what they wanted was Nazi Germany, but then I'd wind up invoking Godwin's Law.
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Where do you think all of that money goes? For gold-plated toilet seats and expensive executive jets.... I won't argue or deny that executives certainly have their perks and high salaries, but the majority of the profits are reinvested back into the company in to the form of new labs, equipment, etc... Plus, many drug companies pay out decent dividends to their shareholders and owners. Owners probably like you - with you mutual funds and stocks and 401k's!
I assume if you're going to start throwing around the word "coward" then you must have walked the talk yourself, done time in military service, and earned the right to say that.
So where did you serve?
It's real easy to advocate military solutions when it's not YOUR ass on the line.
DG
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Of course they like to obscure their real costs and how much of the total cost was spent marketing the drug rather than actually developing it. If they claim $2 billion to bring a new drug to market then that would be around $500k-$750k for R&D with the remainder going towards marketing (advertising, kick-backs etc.)
This post is insightful! Not a troll! Someone meta-moderate these people, please! Just because this post disagrees with the typical /. mentality of free beer for everyone doesn't make it a troll! This person has a damn good point!
Exactly! Notice that there is 1 year backlog on tetanus shots? Hospitals are being urged to use them sparingly. Why? Only one company makes them today (due to competitve market reasons), and there's not enough profit.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
For Roche themselves, the company mentioned in this article. From part of their 2000 annual report, in a PDF ("Finance") available at: http://www.roche.com/home/investor/inv-finance/inv -reports/inv-reports-2000-annual-report.htm
Marketing and distribution 8,746 (2000) 7,813 (1999)
Research and development 3,950 (2000) 3,782 (1999)
Numbers are in millions of Swiss francs.
Clear enough?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Stories like this one have been in the news for months now and I read each one of them with dismay.
We appear to live in a society where claims of need are used to justify abuses of individual rights. I emphasize the word claim because in almost every case, the justification is not valid.
Salon has carried several stories about the efforts of activists to force big pharma companies to relinquish their patent rights for AIDS drugs that are to be copied in South Africa.[1, 2]. It doesn't matter that in order to increase these people's life expectancy it would make more sense to provide them with adequate food and sanitation. The Economist carried a story a while back (can't link to it) that when AIDS drugs are given away free in Africa, they get resold on the gray market and end up being purchased by people in western countries looking to obtain a cheaper treatment regime. The poor Africans benefit, because they can use the money in a more efficiently to feed their families and provide for the other necessities. The North American or European who buys the gray market drugs benefits since they pay only 60% for the drugs. So who pays for all this? Big pharma. It's forced charity in the name of humanitarianism.
It's popular to piss on big pharma with the retort that they make money hand over fist and they deserve to have some of their enormous profits taken away from them. Maybe someone could enlighten me on this issue. Do pharma stocks give incredible returns on investment? Should I pull all my money from under my mattress and out of Nortel (Ha!) and stick it into Roche?
wrong - R&D funds are actually on par with advertising, marketing, and CEO salaries of the Big Pharm Corps. If their R&D budgets were at risk they can cut back on Mr Fat Cat.
Anyway, are you really so gullible to think that a Pharm Co would not do R&D ? that's like General Motors deciding not to build new models of cars. Its counter to common business sense.
Profits from a single drug like TYlenol are so vast that the R&D costs are easily met. You're jkust spouting a typical conservative argument that favors $$ and BigCorps over common sense.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Since we're playing the software analogy game... if an "open-source" drug company lets their bugs all hang out... then a "closed-source" drug company has the same bugs, only not publicized, and people don't get anything but the major releases... and if there are bugs in those releases, too bad, use this upgrade or wait for the next one.
It's times like this I'm glad analogies are never entirely accurate... though how close to the target I'm hitting here, I don't want to know. Yet.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I know there's some drugs so the patient will suffer less, or feel better, but in fact it does not *cure* AIDS no?
I just hope the day a true cure will be found, it will not be patented, so everyone in the world will be able to take it for 1$.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
It is quite possible to have state-sponsored medical research without having to have state ownership of the drug companies.
One way to do it is similar to the military procurement process - put it up for competitive bid.
The state puts aside funds for a certain purpose - say a cure for AIDS. Some of those funds are front-loaded to drug companies seeking the contract. The rest is used for milestone bonuses, and a REALLY big bonus at the end for the first company to find the cure. Once the cure is found, release the formula to the world as public domain.
As long as the money is good, there's no reason why you won't see drug companies signing up - especially as R&D usually has spinoffs.
The world doesn't need to be pure capitalist or pure communist. A decent mix of the best of both gets a lot more done.
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The patent rights granted in Brasil are actually granted by the Brasilian Government. Since they grant the rights, it stands to reason they can also take these away. In fact, Brasilian law says these rights can be taken away in case of war or national emergency. The US has such eminent domain laws too. By saying that Brasil can not choose to override patents that they have granted you are saying that a soverign democracy can not choose the laws they make or change.
/.
As for research being affected, the company knew the law before it invested in research, and that didnt seem to stop them. In fact, if someone can't pay, the company doesn't get money whether the patient lives or dies. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. Instead, companies expect to make money from the people that can pay.
Patents are granted for the benefit of society. Democracies are allowed to choose the laws they believe benefit them the most. By saying corporations should be granted absolute unchangable rights you are taking away from democracy and supporting a corporation-dominated world. It's a frightening trend seen even here on
Lies about crimes
Yes, they're making a profit, but they took a $2 billion chance to do it - what about all the other companies doing aids research who are billions in the hole because they found nothing? Risks have to pay off, or no one will take them.
Isn't it time for the human race to evolve beyond greed?
The worlds governments should terminate medical patents altogeather, and eliminate corporations that profit from other peoples illness and death, then set up an internationally funded (that means EVERY country on the planet paying a large but reasonable fee) research center, with the greatest minds on the planet, that allow all countries to benefit from this kind of research.
The statement
Drug patents make me sick
Might well be a true statement, if you're too poor to aford the drugs which are overpriced due to patents, and you end up sick because of it.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
"Software patents are bad."
Why is that? You equate a software patent to a government monopoly. I don't get the connection. Patents are typically owned by non-governmental parties, and ENFORCED by governments. Get over it.
"Ideas are not property, nor are inventions inherently something to be possessed..." The Patent office, and myself, disagree with you. This type of rhetoric about how an idea cannot be owned is typical Communist pap. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Bah! Weath redistribution (whether material or intellectual) is robbery, pure and simple.
They already have pills in the work that will make the medicene inactive if it's tampered with.
True Story!!
HIV is nothing new, probably been with the human race thousands of years.
AIDS is a syndrome, not a disease.
AIDS, the syndrome, is made up of 30 or so previously existing diseases, pnuemonia, lymphoma, etc.
HIV negative people die of AIDS, too.
The common link between AIDS patients is not HIV, but a compromised immune system.
This is the tip of the iceberg here, if you want to learn more, please read Inventing the Aids Virus by Dr. Peter Duesberg, available through the standard channels.
I actually talked to someone working for a pharmaceutical company a few months ago, and he could confirm what you are saying: their R&D was targetted at producing medicines that could be sold over and over, because they generate much more revenue.
(going a little off topic)
I guess lots of pharmaceutical companies were a bit peeved when some Australian guy found out the cause of stomach ulcers 10 years ago. It turns out they are caused by a bacteria (Helicobacter Pylori), and can easily be treated with specific antibiotics. Before that time, you either had to use expensive anti-acid medicine like Zantac, which didn't cure anything, or have a part of your stomach surgically removed.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
This is about a government that doesn't want to pay money that a corporation rightfully deserves.
There's a number of arguments floating around that have a tremendous amount of ignorance about the global economic and political system. I'll pick three:
1) "I can't believe people are justifying profits over people"
2) "Evil corporations make money at the expense of lives"
3) "AIDS research should be government funded"
So here's my counter argument:
- Profit is an objective necessity. It's not evil.
- Companies that aren't profitable go away. If they filled needs in the past, those needs will potentially no longer be met once bankrupt.
- Companies that research AIDS are doing so because there's a need in the marketplace.
- There's a need for AIDS research because governments aren't putting enough resources into it
- Governments aren't putting enough resources into it because their constitutents (i.e. those who democratically elected them) don't want them to. ("Cut taxes" , "cut spending" implies that something isn't getting done by the government anymore.)
Since everyone in this forum seems to be focused on "profits over people", I'm going to explain my position on that one mainly, for the sake of (ahem) brevity:
What do companies do with profit? Typically profit is placed in four areas: 1) "retained earnings", or re-investment in a company - 2) Dividends, or rewards to the owners of the company, - 3) Profit sharing, or rewards to the executives of the company, 4) Charitable donations.
The reality is that profit is mainly used as a tool for re-investment. It is secondarily used as a means of growing wealth for investors. In past times (centuries ago), profit was primarily used for growing investor wealth, but this has changed a lot as capital markets have evolved rely much heavier on "value growth" in stock prices.
Hence, profit, while an indicator of how investors will fare, is not necessarily the primary instrument by which investors gain wealth.
Well, if profit is used mainly for re-investment -- not for lining shareholder pockets, what happened to the profit motive? You know, the main reason that people are apparently in business?
Does profit tell us anything about *WHY* someone is in business in the first place? No.
Profit is an objective necessity for corporations to stay alive. A company that loses money for too long is "bankrupt", and won't be around for much longer, and doesn't do anyone any good. It squandered resources that could have been put to better use. Profit is not primarily about greed, it is however about performance -- using resources (i.e. money) effectively. It says nothing about what a corporation does day to day, or what a manager must do day-to-day (things like marketing, human resource management, planning, innovating, communicating, and researching)
The whole point to businesses in today's world is the nature of the relationship between organizations & society to meet our economic and social needs.
Some organizations (businesses) fulfill each other's needs by sensing those needs (marketing), and responding to them (innovation & entrepreneurship), receiving money as an exchange for the value they provide to a customer.
Other organizations fill society's needs by determining an agenda (organizing), finding people that agree with their needs (marketing) and asking for money to support them (donations). These are NGO's and non-profit organizations. (we need more of these)
The former organization type is concerned with the productive use of economic resources in filling a need. The latter organization type is concerned with fulfilling a social agenda, using donations to sustain themselves.
The whole reason we need profit is to ensure that these "for profit" organizations are run effectively and have a means to cover the inherent risks involved with any new venture.
Since they don't solicit for donations, profit satisfies the market need for capitalists - i.e. people who will give money out to a risky proposition if they can make more money out of it (it could be called "gambling" by the cynical, but large scale investment gambling is a major reason the world has progressed so quickly..)
So, it's not so easy that "people are dying for your stinking profit".. there's a reason for profit, and while Brazil's action is an isolated case, we can't view this as the beginning of a universal trend -- such a trend is not sustainable given our economic system (which will continue to remain so as no viable alternatives appear ready for the forseeable future).
-Stu
While this may not be the most popular opinion, I'm siding with Brazil on this. Roche is going for a quick money grab, plain and simple.
The drug "nelfinavir" isn't a cure for AIDS. It is only supposed to slow/stop the progress of the disease in the body. A patient who is on the drug has to stay on it for the rest of their life; even an economics 101 student knows that you'll eventually pull in more money with more lifetime customers by lowering the price of the drug rather than let a good portion of your potential clientele die because you are trying to gouge them.
And I doubt anyone can successfully argue that Roche doesn't know this. They've been in business for over 100 years.
Patent issues aside, it is undisputed that these people are infected with HIV, and there is no solution to make it otherwise. However, the drug can be produced by someone else; there is a solution other than Roche to produce the drug. Maybe the company should have realized this when they were ultimately denying these potential patients of their lives...
And while patents are supposed to protect the innovations of a corporation, I don't think that any country would put the rights of the corporation ahead of the individual's right to live.
I don't understand people saying U.S. (or at least, U.S. companies) will lost money with Brazil producing the drugs while American goverment is comercially so close to China, the world's greatest pirate. In this case, between nuclear powers, the concepts are diferent?
Of course, rather than have that second rate international man of mystery pony up the money, one could just ask Derek Flint to whip up a cure in between pissing contests with Maxwell Smart and Joh Steed.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Roche is definitely one company I don't feel sorry for. They plead guilty to "illegal collusive practices" (ie price fixing) in the vitamin market, and were fined $500M.
Good for Brazil! What makes man feel that he has any knowledge let alone what makes man feel that he owns any knowledge? Patents and secrets are counter-productive to the advancement of the human race as is grossly evident in this individual case. It is not until that we as a society do away with trade secrets that we as a race can truly become great and combat all of the ills that currently face us.
So why don't just confistigate Bill Gate's property and give it to the poor people? 100 billion dollars can feed a lot of homeless. It's for the public good - Evil Empire destroyed, software quality improves and poor people happy, right?
Ok, look, I have been following this story through out the day, and I just can't stand it any more. It is people like this who need to have thier eyes opened up.
If you think that AIDS is only caught by IDU (IV Drug Users) and Gays, you could not be more wrong. I would know. I am a straight man who got AIDS trying to help someone who had AIDS. Now if you think God is taking his wrath out on me, I believe you to be close minded and wrong.
What would God have to punish me for? I am and have been a baptized Christian for years. I have lived a moral life. I do not use drugs and I am not gay.
It sickens me to hear people like this say that AIDS is not an indiscriminate killer. It never asked me if I sleep around. It never asked me if I used drugs. It never asked me if I were gay. It just said, "Hi, I'm AIDS and you have me now!"
Please think about what kind of stupid non-sense you are posting before you post it.
Do I believe it is a good thing that Brazil did this? Yes I do. These drug companies have been price gouging the 3rd world countries for YEARS!!! and I say it is time that it stops! Perscriptions in these 3rd world countries are known to charge 4-10 times the amount they would charge someone here in the states. I say give us the higher prices, we (for the most part) have insurance to help with our bills! Whereas these people for the most part have nothing!
Now they're going to make everyone take AIDS drugs, and these AIDS drugs will give more people AIDS then it will prevent. Then people in the US will be forced to take the pills also, nowhere will be safe.
Though I disagree with a patent on a drug (drugs are parts of plants, created by God and therefore God owns all the rights to them), I'd very much like to see this patent hold, and I hope those swiss want to keep it all to themselves.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What about when your whore of a wife goes sleeping around with every guy/gal she meets? When she goes out, are you sure she isn't screwing someone else?
Public funding is responsible for more R&D into AIDS than private corporations.
Monetary incentives brings out the greed in people. That's not a side of humanity that I would particularly want to nourish.
On a personal note, the sheer number of Slashdot posters that have reduced the very real AIDS problem into another version of "gubmit vs. freedom" is frightening to me. For the love of Jesus H. fuckin' Christ, people are dying, and we don't need rich uncle Pharm as a drain on resources. We can't fight a PANDEMIC half-heartedly. Nobody can.
I guess I shouldn't be suprised, this sort of shit is not new; adolescent-minded White people have always had a reason for their abominations. Read your history.
Wise man say, choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them...
Let's see "insightful", that would be a profound or well considered expression. I think that Abraham Lincoln shouldn't have wasted all that verbage at Gettysburg. He could have just screamed out "Way to fucking Go!!!", and learned the economy of expression which can be heard at a frat boy's porno party.
I see another posts with some well-articulated, perfectly valid points who was labeled as a "troll".
As for all those who would encourage Africa to do the same as Brazil, why don't you read up on how the South African government has refused to distribute the drugs they were GIVEN by American Pharmaceutical companies who were intimidated by the international version of white guilt. You can find out all about it at www.andrewsullivan.com
This is bad for R&D. Opposing it merely because it is patented and you think some patents are stupid is just criminal ignorance. Michael seems to be a communist with the political sophistication of a 5 year old in Sunday school who knows that Jesus loves him because the bible told him so. As to what crack these other would-be Chairman Mao's are smoking, Please try some smack, it will kill you quicker.
Guess what people: AIDS is not spread by a lack of federal funding. It is spread by fucking and shooting up. The African president who decreed that his people stop fucking is not totally wrong, except in his expectation that his ignorant populace will actually listen to him.
And look at that "Operating Profit as a % of sales" for last year: 35%! To me, that's bordering on obscene.
To compare with another industry that people accuse of gouging, look at the defense contractor Raytheon. They don't appear to have a nice number laid out in their annual report (or at least not one I can find easily), but if "Operating Income" is synonymous with profit (dunno), then for 2000:
$1.625 billion on $16.895 billion in net sales:
9.61% operating profit: i.e., Roche was 3.64 times as profitable.
So here's a word from an angry consumer: *fuck* you for charging what the market can "bear", as protected by Congress against laws allowing re-importation, etc.
There was an article in the Washington Post's Outlook section (not a hard news section, granted) that had some reporting about how disingenous the drug companies are about development costs versus how much they spend marketing. I guess there was a study in the 60s (?) on the same idea, with the conclusion that drug companies gouged, but too many Congressmen are owned by Pfizer, etc. for anything to ever happen.
Not that I'm bitter.
I could go on for a while on a lot of these various points, but its probably not worth it, so I'll leave it at this.
ah... the joys of development...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
For every AIDS-denying doctor, there are thousands who are actually working to help the problem. If I were a betting man, I'd would have more to say about that.
Wise man say, choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them...
Your examples are absurd. Bayer asperin (sp?) competes successfully with generics precisely because of the market recognition and trust that developed as a result of Bayer's patent protection. And I would love to understand exactly why corporations are going to form consortia to do research and spend huge amounts of clinical trials and FDA hoops and marketing costs just to bring to market a drug which they brand but cannot realize proportionately large profits from.
As for your example of defense spending...I seriously hope you don't want to use defense spending as an example of how the government really should be allocating resources. They have achieved wonderful technologies, to be sure, but at ridiculously high costs that few can deny. And from your stances I hazard a bet that you are just the sort of person who probably decries government military spending all the time except just now. Don't you ?
The purpose of patent is not promoting innovation, but promoting innovation when innovation is too little.
Problem of many innovations is the positive externality. Because the free market without patent fail to compensate the innovators for the goods an innovation done to others, the innovators lost incentive to innovate to the point that is optimal to the society. Patent is not to protect the benefits of the innovators. Patent is to protect the benefits of the society as a whole.
Monopoly is also sub-optimal. However, through the use of monopoly power from patent, innovators have the incentive to innovate more. The existence of patent length is to balance the social cost of monopoly and the social gain of innovation.
Now, the social cost of letting this monopoly on the AIDS drug stand is huge (the lost of lives of AIDS patients who would have stayed alive if they could buy those drug). The drug company has captured quite a lot of profits from it already. I would say that's enough for them to keep innovating. Don't you think it's time for the drugs to save more lives?
Is the fixed patent length good for any situation? The answer is definitely no. In some situation, letting the patent length shorter is better to the society as a whole. I'm afraid this is the case.
So stop fighting on the merit of keeping this patents or not. If you guys want to argue, argue how much gain to the society for saving those lives without the patents and how much lost to the society because of the discouragement in innovation.
A sig is redundant.
The difference is I won't die if I can't afford Coca-Cola or Shredded Wheat.
And if I must have them, I can always go for the generic brands at the store at a cheaper cost.
This is basically what Brazil is doing: producing their own generic brand.
Safeway Select AIDS Cocktails.
This is not a patent problem, but a
political issue. Don't forget that
next year 2002 is the Brazilian
Presidential Elections and the
current Government intends to
be reelected.
Furthermore, when the Brazilian Public
Administration spends money to buy
medical products, it's a kind of
"income source" for those who are
in the political class such as the
Serra Minister.
Brazil has enough money to pay for
the anti-AIDS cocktails, but the
money is concentrated on a privileged
group that doesn't care about human
lives. Probably, a little bit different
from the inhabitants of developed
countries...
What a dumbass comment. Where did the people get the AID's from, public toilet seats?
Contrary to your opinion, AIDS is not spread by a lack of Federal Funding.
This is my real issue with the Libertarians of the world. There is no place in their world-view for the public project, done for the benefit of mankind. Everything must have a profit motive, and protecting profits has priority over all else.
This is just not so! If you want to create or support a non-profit organization for AIDS research, Libertarians would applaud (well, I would)!
But let's recognize the difference between a for-profit entity and not-for-profit. The former's mandate is to use economic resources productively to fill consumer needs.
The latter's mandate is to use donations to pursue a social agenda, with economic efficiency being (somewhat) irrelevant.
So, the task is to not complain about Roche wanting money, it's to A) vote for a government that will fund research, and B) create or donate to non-profit institutes.
Or, C) pay Roche what they want.
-Stu
Aren't they? Microsoft is doing great, so is Oracle and so is most software development companies with real working bussinessmodels.
Microsoft has only lost a few percentage of their stockvalue this year, that must be a record in the IT-sector.
The only reason I work is to get money to live the life I want to live.
"that drug companies making money is more important than saving lives. "
You have it all wrong.
No, drug companies should be making money so they can save lives.
Without them this whole discusion is pointless.
A country is fighting to save the lives of its citizens, and in the process violating international agreements. Heck! We wanted to end WWII, so we killed 400,000 + men, women, and children at Hiroshima and Nagazaki in 1945.
Was that "cost" warranted to save the lives of millions of US servicemen who might have been killed in combat invading Japan? As far as the US is concerned, probably. As far as Japan is concerned, absolutely not.
Likewise, Brazil is fighting a killing disease on a grand scale. Is the "cost" of violating international patent protection (profit protection really) warranted in the effort to potentially prevent the slow and horrible death of millions of Brazilians? I can guarantee that if I was the president of Brazil, I would say: "That was the easiest decision I ever made", just like what Roosevelt is reported to have said after ordering the anihilation of 400,000 men, women, and children in a nuclear holocaust.
[On a complete tangent, Hitler would have been so proud of the speed and efficiency of our euthanasia program--instead or bringing the people to the hellish place, you bring the hellish place to them. 400,000 in three days: that comes to about 290,000,000 in 6 years.]
"Piter, too, is dead."
You talk as if it would be easy to "educate" the population on how to avoid AIDS. It can be a very simple thing to do in your safe european home, but it is very hard in a big, complex and not so rich country such as Brazil.
I am brazilian, and I am writing these from my office in São Paulo.
First of all, sharing needles are a minor problem in Brazil. We don't have heroin here. People use other cheaper drugs, such as cocaine and marijuana. Smoking crack is perhaps the biggest problem, but it doesn't give you AIDS.
People get Aids mostly for doing sex. Since you are so intelligent, I invite you to come here to Brazil and sucessfully convince the people that they have to spend a half of the salary in condons or stop doing sex, which sometimes is the only pleasure they can afford. It is only impossible. The government also doesn't have enough funds to give these condons for free. Nevertheless, it has done a lot of public campaigns to avoid Aids, but you can't solve a problem as big as this by only using advertisement.
The fact is that breaking copyrights is saving lives. If you put in a balance one single life in one side and corporations interests in the other, I will always choose a living person. Come on! These corporations are going to fund research don't matter what Brazil does. They still have a huge (and rich!) market in the northern hemisphere, so why are you complaining about the last hope of a few miserables? Do you really think that Brazil (or South Africa, or any other non-developed country) would be the one to pay for the cure of Aids?
Please, stop being so selfish and start to realise that there are some places (and people ) in the world that don't have the same opportunities you have.
and F-You if you don't "get it"
Brasil is their own F-in country for cyring out loud. They don't need to respect some company's patents. If you had your own country you wouldn't have to fear the RIAA or MPAA or Merck either.
At least someone has the balls to do what is right. God knows if it were up to America (which really means the corporations) we'd still have polio.
Finally, someone actually gets it.
Our "sexual freedom" destroys families. It ruins lives. It transmits disease. It encourages disloyalty, dysfunction, and distrust.
... all of these can be potentially deadly actions.
The big problem with people who think that STDs are good is this: ANY kind of human contact can transmit a disease. Touching, talking, kissing, sharing eating utensils
So, using your logic, we can rewrite your argument like this:
Our "freedom in human contact" destroys families. It ruins lives. It transmits disease. It encourages disloyalty, disfunction, and distrust.
Furthermore, your argument is not unilaterally true. I can rewrite your statement like this, except this time the statement is true:
Our "sexual freedom" does not always destroy families. It does not always ruin lives. It does not always transmit disease. It does not always encourage disloyalty, nor disfunction, nor distrust.
Your argument is crap. I claim that there is nothing inherently morally wrong with consensual sex. If you disagree, then be prepared to show your evidence why.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
The drugs are not intended for SALE. Theyll never be sold. Its produced in government-owned labs. The Brazilian government gives it away for FREE.
> intellectual) is robbery, pure and simple.
Damn right, and that's why teachers should be entitled to decide what their students do with all the intellectual wealth that was redistributed to them. </irony>
Ideas cannot be redistributed, only spread. If I get to know what you know you don't suddenly forget about it, we both know it. The wealth only arises out of the artificial scarcity that prohibits me from using your ideas. The summed natural worth of ideas would be maximal if everybody knew them and could use them. The question is if this unhindered distribution would cause some ideas to not come up, and if that is worth _making_up_ IP-laws. The people who did it thought so. Perhaps they are right, perhaps not, I'm not sure. But don't pretend it's simple unless you realy think it's your natural right to force me to do with _my_ knowledge what _you_ want, only because you knew it first.
And, sorry, but I think people who insist that such thought-control is their natural right need to have their asses kicked.
There's a rather good BBC production called The Human Body. One of the episodes looked into the development of ethics. The ethical problem was "should you steal drugs to save your dying <familymember/>".
Children aged 8-9 inevitably said "no". The concept of stealing (to them) was totally wrong and there was no justification for it.
Children aged 12+ were less decisive. In an ethical judgement between death and theft the children agreed that theft is the lesser evil.
So it's depressing to discover how many people here have the ethical development of an 8 year old.
1. there is still no cure for AIDS. The drugs discussed just postpone for the sero-positive the outbreak of AIDS. But it disease and subsequent death remains unavoidable.
2. subsequently, and especially if you consider the bad financial situation of many a developing country in which AIDS is sweeping entire generations (Brazil is still well of in this aspect; take a look at [South-]Africa!), SPENDING MONEY ON TEACHING SEXUALLY SAFE BEHAVIOUS AS WELL AS PROGRAMS OF FREE NEEDLE EXCHANGE FOR DRUG ADDICTS ARE THE ONLY FINANCIALLY AS WELL AS PRACTICALLY EFFECTIVE CURES!
Drashcan
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
and totaly biased.
As most of you stated Brazilian government is breaking the law, which is plain wrong, it's using the full extent of the contry's law.
Some points did not get explained or shown on this thread:
-There are about 17 drugs on the AIDS coquetel, about 11 are royalty free and generic are produced by local pharmaceutical companies for less than 30% of the big companies prices. The remaining drugs were been bought from roche and others, accounting for more than 70% of the costs.
-The Brazilian patent laws allow the goverment to provide these patents to other companies given the new prices are much lower. Local companies are producing roche's drugs about 4 times cheaper and they make a lot of profits.
-This is saving Brazilian government about 250Milhons USD a year.
-India is doing this very same for years, with more drugs. To me seens like the drugs companies are trying to make Brazil the scape goat to avoid any other poor nation to do the same.
-US government have allready threated Brazilian's to stop that or will create a comertial barrier to Brazilian products. This is not big news, this have been done with other countries, regardless global trade agencies saying that this would be ilegal.
The big battle is not about the patents broken, but with the Brazilian IP laws, which are offencive to the US government, soo fair it was the only country to say soo.
Talking about threatening, the US government is demanding all countries that plan to join the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) to create a law on the models of the DMCA, even if this means that current laws should be revogated.
This is old news and the way the US government is mananging the situation is the same for all its international afairs "Do our way or we'll make sure you are out of business very soon", a politics adopted by it's local companies btw.
And sorry for the many english mistakes, I'm not from an english speaking country.
Read the period. It's 3 years ago.
poor Roche
Looks like I'll just climb back up into my 'Ivory Tower'.
Blar.
Something that makes me sick about the current system (FWIW I consider myself a capitalist) is that investment flows to companies with the highest profit margin.
Why does this make me sick? Because there are industries with artificially high profit margins because of government protection. In this case it's drug companies but many industries that fall under the banner of "Intellectual Property" have these artificially high margins.
If company X who trades in IP (with govt granted monopolies) can make 3-4 times the profits of company Y who trades real world goods and services, investment is obviously going to flow to company X and others like it.
This undermines what makes capitalism work, competition.
Australian? Join EFA
Since do-gooders in what was then the Belgian Congo decided to make their own polio vaccine from the local chimp and monkey popluation, which just happened to be infested with SIV (the ape equivalent of AIDS), they injected literally thousands of humans with SIV until the virus finally mutated and became HIV aka AIDS. I say that they should pay for the treatment of everyone on the planet with AIDS. They started it. Let them mop up the consequences.
HDGary secures my bank
One must remember that the root purpose of patents is to promote the public good. In certain circumstances, I think that governments are completely justified in breaking patent protections in order to deal with major issues.
that being said, I think that if the government can afford to, emminant domain makes more sense than all-out infringement. But it may not be an option for Brazil.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Suppose the drug companies introduce a cure that requires an additive, like filings obtained from the steering wheel of a 2001 Porsche Boxster.
Now Mr. Brazil says, "Well, yes, this is real stealing, but we still have to fight AIDS. Actually, we're working on only stealing cars and using the money to buy many different drugs that we need desperately. With this type of specialization we can cut the crime rate...to just auto theft. We're working on many different programs."
In principle, I agree with you. But really, what else could the government of Brazil do? Ethicaly you may be correct. Economically you may be correct. Legally, you may be correct. But politically, there?s no way a foreign government is going to get away with telling millions of it?s citizens they're going to die because of some US IP law. That's just reality.
In fact the United States didn't honour copyright either, they only did so at the beginning of the 20. century. So many popular works were blatantly copied in the USA and the Government didn't even do as much as raise a finger about that. So the USA only began to be concerned about international IP-Laws, when it fit their bill, and when the US american business would profit from it.
Sorry, i don't see anything wrong, with other countries making their own laws with regard to IP-laws. Especially regarding the current state of US american IP-legislation (apparently the product the USA are most eager to export). Maybe it will help to create more sensible international IP-legislation, but most of all, it'll help to break monopolies built solely on ip-laws. Such monopolies are not a good thing, the restrictions of IP-legislation like the DMCA does more harm than good to international R&D.
Where before the industry, the science and the technical knowledge was employed to establish the status quo and cheat 'poorer' countries out of their rich natural resources, now IP-laws are put to work. Japan did the right thing, when they decided 'learn' from other countries to bootstrap their industrial revolution about 1980. Why shouldn't other countries now do the same. Why should these countries consider themselves bound by legislation that originated in the USA and mostly benefits other countries, not them? Why adopt and enforce laws, that hurt their own business?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Bullshit. It's not illegal, it's compulsory licensing and it's allowed under the same international treaties that make the patent valid.
Which has always been the way governments are created... through the legitimated monopoly on the means of violence.
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
The America is losing it's status of state of liberty by each day that goes.. the DMCA, **AA, Echelon, Carnivore, Tempest...
I'm not saying Brazil will be the new symbol of freedom, I'm just saying America is not free since A LONG time ago.
Way to go Brazil! Now, if we could only do the same on Africa...
You have to remember, many drug companies now spend nearly as much or more on media advertising than they do on actual drug research! Cut out the advertising and you can lower your prices to something reasonable! We are paying for their ads more than their research! Advertising for perscription drugs seems idiotic, especially those ones where they only give the name of the drug and not its use or vice versa (this is set by regulation, they can either give the name, or what it does, but not both without having to list the side-effects).
Also, on a side note, much of the research is now done in collaboration with university labs, and many med schools are heavily supported by nature of being attached to these patents.....
First of all, could you quote chapter and verse regarding the law you mentioned?
IIRC, some cities have mandatory assistance laws, but generally it's not required.
Remember that the US is a collection of fifty states, which is each a collection of a number of counties, which is each a collection of a number of cities and townships. Each level has its own government, and each level can create its own laws.
(Case in point: the drinking age is not a federal law. It's law in all fifty states, but it's not federal law. Basically, the federal government said, "Raise your drinking age to 21 or we won't give you any money for roads" and the states capitulated. But it's not a federal law.)
Anyway, my second point: most areas have "good-samaritan laws", protecting people that help victims. IMNSHO, that's the better route to go: don't force people to help, but don't penalize them for trying.
You need to get your facts straight before telling us to get ours straight.
For the defense of Liberty: Soapbox, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
o/~ All God's children shall be free in Pirates of the Caribbean, when we reach that Magic Kingdom in the sky... o/~
Most of the research for these drugs are done by the government and universities, and then are just handed over, free of charge, to the drug companies. This "it will stop R&D" is BS, the majority of the R&D work is publically funded, although the profit on it is capitalized among a select few.
It's a paradoxycal situation. The point here is that somebody somewhere is treating human lives as monetary value, which doesn't strike me as very ethically appleasing.
Maybe there _is_ a manner to settle this, and it's actually so simple that I'm surprised nobody evern mentioned it.
Some UN-funded agency could simply BUY the patents for some life-saving drugs from the holders (thus ensuring proper compensation for the development) and then license them free-of-charge to anybody willing to produce them (thus ensuring price-lowering via free market competition), or even just putting the patents in the Public Domain.
Sure, such an UN agency would probably be a big drain on UN funding, but I as a citizen of a "developed" country am willing to give some of my tax money for such ethically-compelling matters, and I am sure many others would agree.
How many billions of dollars did Roche make last year? Don't be such a fucking idiot. You probably think Microsoft is going to close up doors too, since I just downloaded a pirate version of Windows.
Oh yeah, and how much money was Roche making off Brazil that they won't anymore? Like 1% of their total revenue? Less? Yeah, so STFU.
Logical fallacies are so much fun. You are arguing that we throw away the lives of millions for some hypothetical dystopian future where all pharm corps go out of business.
There are already many countries around the world with more socialized health care, and apparently drug companies still feel it profitable to sell their wares in those countries. I don't recall hearing that Pfizer was pulling out of Canada, do you?
This sure does sound like bullshit FUD when you consider what a small percentage of their revenue goes to R&D, and what huge profits they make. So what if the shareholders get a few less $, you really think they'll stop making drugs?
What you don't seem to understand is that they weren't making jack of Brazil in the first place. Brazil can't pay it. It's like when Adobe goes around saying how they lost $10 trillion from all the fucking college kids who pirate Photoshop. Wrong. None of those kids have the money or desire to pay the $700 for Photoshop, and if they weren't able to warez it they'd just use MS Paint and deal with it. Adobe lost nothing. And neither did this drug company.
So stop your damn chicken little act and open your eyes to the fact that Brazil is extending/improving the lives of millions of its citizens with essentially no negative consequences for the poor mistreated multinational pharm corps.
"Other countries can produce the drugs. And under earlier patent regimes, you had process patents. I don't even know if those are legitimate, but process patents meant that if some pharmaceutical company figured out a way to produce a drug, somebody smarter could figure out a better way to produce it because all that was patented was the process. So, if the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry figured out a way to make it cheaper and better, fine, they could do it. It wouldn't violate patents. The World Trade Organization regime insists instead on product patents, so you can't figure out a smarter process. Notice that impedes growth, and development and is intended to. It's intended to cut back innovation, growth, and development and to maintain extremely high profits."
After all, you are completely correct that we overspend on AIDS research relative to, say, malaria. However, US political groups are a big part of the reason that we do that. There are pressure groups that want research into some disease (AIDS, breast cancer, whatever), and they lobby the government for more funding based on that. It's understandable, given that they suffer from the disease, but it's just as unfair.
It's absolutely ridiculous to think that political power wouldn't affect research decisions under a completely government-funded system, considering that right now political power drives government research on diseases.
You named 2 - they're dominant corporations in their fields. i assure you that some decent companies are suffering, and the really awful ones are dead/on their way out.
and microsofts stock value isn't were it is because of any great performance on their part (not bad performance, but not great). it is their because they are seen as stable, which comes at a premium in the stock markets these days.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Stunned by Brazil's threat to break a patent on Roche drug nelfinavir (Viracept), and to make the medicine in a state factory at a fraction of the cost, Roche said an accord was within reach to cut its discounted price for Viracept even more in 2002.
"We were extremely surprised to hear the news...because we have been in a long-standing relationship with the Brazilian government, which has been particularly committed to active programmes to handle AIDS in Brazil," a Roche spokesman said. Roche now sells Viracept, whose patent is held by US firm Pfizer Inc., at less than half the US wholesale price in Brazil and has offered a steeper discount in 2002, he added.
"We are very close to reaching an agreement which is based upon a further, additional discount," spokesman Daniel Piller said. He said Basel-based Roche also intends to start manufacturing Viracept tablets in Brazil next year and to continue to provide Viracept syrup free of charge to Brazilian children with AIDS.
Brazil's health minister, Jose Serra, said on Wednesday he had started the process of issuing a compulsory license to make Viracept at a Brazilian factory after failing to obtain sufficient price concessions from Roche. Under Brazilian law the government can issue a compulsory license to make a patented drug when a "national emergency" is invoked.
If the plan proceeds, it may be the first patent violation of an AIDS drug in the world and make the medicine available at lower prices in Brazil early next year.
The Brazilian dispute could eventually spread to include US officials, who filed a complaint against Brazil's patent law with the World Trade Organisation earlier this year, then withdrew it under pressure from world leaders and health organisations who praise Brazil's aggressive response to AIDS.
"We understand that any decision to declare a compulsory license requires the communication of this decision to the US Trade Representative. This was something which was agreed between the Brazilian and US governments in July 2001 and that is also a reason why we were surprised," Piller said.
BOMBAY (Reuters Health) Aug 06 - Indian drugmaker Cipla Ltd said on Monday that it has launched the first three-in-one tablet to treat HIV infection that contains the antiretroviral drugs stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine.
Cipla, which shot into international prominence in February by offering to supply combination antiretroviral therapy for less than $1 a day, said in a statement that a month's supply of the new pill, Triomune, would cost patients $38.21.
The company statement said the price represented a five- to six-fold reduction in the monthly cost of therapy. The new product is the first to combine the three antiretroviral drugs in one tablet, which has not been available because the patents for these drugs are controlled by different companies.
Britain's GlaxoSmithKline holds the patent on lamivudine, Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim has the patent on nevirapine and US drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb holds the patent on stavudine.
Cipla is permitted by Indian patent law to make drugs that are patented by other companies internationally because the law protects only the processes by which drugs are made, and not the drugs themselves. This means Indian companies can make drugs under patent in the West, provided they use a process that is different from the original.
In February, the company offered to supply the three drugs to the international charity Medecins Sans Frontieres for $350 per patient per year, a thirtieth of the US price.
The U.S. Government did all the R&D for ddI. They could not market it so they used some selection process to license it to Bristol Meyers Squibb (BMS) for ten years. BMS turns around and goes for the jugular when Thailand tries to klone ddI. Eventually this happened:
-----
* Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 19:47:24 -0500 (EST)
THAILAND WILL PRODUCE GENERIC DDI POWDER
The Thai Ministry of Public Health today announced that it will not apply compulsory license but that it will let the Government Pharmaceutical Organization (GPO) produce the powder of ddI. About 100 activists had gathered outside the Ministry of Public Health to hear the decision of the Public Health Minister.
ddI powder is not patent protected in Thailand. One sachet will cost $0.7 (equivalent to 150 mg); daily cost will therefore be $ 1.4 compared to currently about $ 3.7 No generic tablets will be available because of the patent.
The problem with ddI is the expensive raw material because there is only one relatively small supplier in Canada. Raw material from a Japanese producer is only 55% of the cost but this is the BMS supplier and BMS has prevented the company from selling to other customers. If BMS would be interested to actually do something for people they could offer ddI at a daily cost of probably less than $ 1.0!
No discount for the BMS product has been announced so far.
There are many open questions:
As reason for not applying compulsory license the Ministry of Public Health quoted fear for a BMS law suit and lacking support from the Dept of Intellectual Property. The Dept. of Intellectual Property said that they were "worried" to use compulsory license but refused to name reasons. Several activists questioned why compulsory license is in the law if it can not be used.
The Public Health Minister was asked why ddI powder was not produced already two years ago; he replied that he was not yet Health Minister at that time.
The NGO network had demanded compulsory license for ddI since last year and had also demanded the production of ddI powder as an interim solution. NGO representatives will meet with the US ambassador to Thailand tomorrow, Tuesday to hand over a letter to President Clinton asking for a statement that the US government will not interfere if Thailand uses compulsory license for ddI.
Tido von Schoen-Angerer, MD
MSF Thailand
msfdrugs@asianet.co.th-th-th-end
(remove "-th-th-end" to reply)
Drugs aren't developed in the name of humanity, they're developed for the benefit of stockholders. The fact that they also benefit humanity is fortuitous gravy. You may think that is a cold system, but it is a system that has worked exceedingly well. It is a system that has discovered hundreds of miraculous treatments.
In 20 years the patent will expire and then the third world country can start making the drug.
When patents are honored, we have the first world nations getting the benefit of the drug for 20 years, followed by everyone getting the benefit of the drug.
When patents are not honored, we have nobody getting the benefit of the drug because it's never developed in the first place.
You tell me which scenario is better.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
nt
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Brazil is breaking no laws. The treaty gives any nation the ability to disregard foreign patent laws if they invoke a national emergency, OR invoke the health of their citizens.
Beside if a nation isn't in the WTO or leaves the WTO, they need not have any patent laws in their country.
Look at all those Asian countries that only introduced WTO complient Copyright/Patent/Trademark laws, about 5 years ago.
If they decide that unbridled capitalism isnt the way to go & instead decide like the majority of the world that they'd prefer a mixed economy taking policies from both the left & the right, on the basis of what they think is the best policy for the job at hand; that's their right.
They can even decide to leave the WTO & have no patent/copyright/trademark laws if they want. Afterall the world did just fine before such laws existeed too.
If their country's law permit them to do that.
Afterall businesses only exist to make a profit.
If you beleive its unfair, you can always lobby your own goverment to repeal its patent laws so corporations in your country could then do it do.
Afterall Brazil is only looking after its own interests.
Brazil's govt doesn't exist to protect US interests, or does it.
Stupid jackass... are you too terrified to go to web sites on your own? How about Pfizer:
Selling, informational, and administrative expenses: $11,442,000,000
R&D expenses: $4,435,000,000
Merck?
$6 billion on marketing, $2 billion on R&D.
GlaxoSmithKline? They call themselves a "research company"...
$10 billion on "selling, general, and administrative"
$3.8 billion on R&D.
I still can't find information on what Bayer spent on marketing.
All this information is from the companies' annual reports, available for free on their web sites, and this is hardly damning evidence that corps are evil. But it's pretty clear that they do spend way more on marketing than on development.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Bah, you are an 'intellectual communist'.
Your argument about students being precluded from benefiting from the information imparted by teachers doesn't apply: school is not an economic stage, although it certainly prepares the actors for same.
If I take 20 years of my life researching a new way to smelt metal that results in extraordinary materials advances, why should you, who have done nothing but sit on your ass and play Nintendo, get a cut of that invention?
I won't argue that intellectual property is much more difficult to judiciously manage when we are talking computer programs and processes, thus we probably can't realistically protect those types of IP. But I have laugh at the thieving weenies who think it is their right to steal music or video (usually the product of a team of talented artists) just because they don't wanna pay the price demanded for it.