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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.
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.
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
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.
What I've never understood is that, depending on context, a certain "life-style community" associates itself with or dis-associates itself from this disease. In fact, the contexts in which the switch occurs are criticism and funding. If you criticize this "lifestyle community" for their actions which spread/contract AIDS, the response is "AIDS isn't our disease." Yet, when it comes time to push funding to Find A Cure, the same "lifestyle community" leads the charge and calls the ones not gung-ho for this effort as "lifestyle community"-phobic.
I think AIDS: the first disease to be political. Sad.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello