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Patents and Eminent Domain
mrbill writes "Interesting take on the Eminent Domain case now before the Supreme Court. Could the same logic behind using Eminent Domain to take real property be used to take a Patent? Apparently some states are contemplating taking drug company patents to force lower drug prices." From the article: "Patents are the key to huge drug-company profits. The industry will fight vociferously to protect them. In West Virginia, where the issue came up last summer, industry lawyers warned a legislative advisory council away from proposing such action on patents, claiming it would be unconstitutional. "
I'm so bugged with this whole paptent issue. I will tell you why. I was once developing a IM Bot for MSN messenger using perl. I was almost towards the end of coding the bot. Thats when I hear that the IM bot technology is patented by ActiveBuddy. I had to stop development. I wish they had a better model to protect software inventions
fuvoo: watch something
If it's property such that the RIAA and MPAA consider it theft rather than copyright infringement, would states or the federal government have the power to pay "fair market value" (whatever that is) and release it to the public?
Not everything would be that way, of course, but if the government has the right to take land to preserve our natural heritage, why not take art to preserve our cultural heritage?
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I don't think it's really eminent domain in that the Fed Government created this "property" right in the first place.
P.S. Be sure to read Against Intellectual Property by Steven Kinsella
I think that Big Money and Big Media has such a strong grip on national politics and national politicians, that going local is the way to bring leftist/progressive solutions to America. Best to just go ahead and let the Republicans and Republicrats kill off the IRS. THat way the states can start their own mini-IRS's and go ahead with universal healthcare, long term unemployment, low cost broadband, and other progressive/leftist quality of life improvement. All local....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
> Since the drug companies invest so much in research due to the potential profit, wouldn't reducing the potential profit reduce the incentives for research?
I don't know whether it's true or not, but critics claim that the drug companies spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What you leftist, socialist, anti-capitalists don't understand is, without profits, a company doesn't stay in business. If you don't like the price of a drug, don't buy it. Before you start; I tell my Doctor to select an inexpensive drug. He tab's through his PDA, and we descuss the drug he is considering, and it side effects, as well as its price. Once I am satisfied, he writes the prescription. All of my drugs are cheaper if I just pay cash; the insurance co-pay is more than the cost of the drug.
because patents have an expiration. if i have property and some government (local, state, etc) wants to take it, i have rights to fight it in court.
most drug patents are close enough to expiration that the company could delay enough in court to make it a moot point.
eric
What we really need is for patents to protect the copying the invention itself, not all independent developments of the same idea.
Anyone who independently develops an idea without looking to see how the patent holder did it should be able to use and profit by his work.
Fair market value is what the drug company paid the government in the first place, IMHO.
Patents are government granted monopolies. What the government grants, the government can taketh away. When you spend ceaser's coins, don't complain when he taxes you.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Why not? In NYC, Mayor Bloomberg is using Eminent Domain to sieze property from people in Brooklyn brownstones so he can give it to the giant developer, Ratner, for a private arena/mall. If a Republican billionaire can "liberate" actual real estate for his developer buddies, why can't we do the same with patents, when that property is not actually removed from its owner, and is actually given to the public?
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make install -not war
The Law gives, the law takes away" was the court's basic argument.... It will be really funny to find out what happens when the Congress wants to "take away" This could be good or bad, after all, When We want to get copyright back under control we'll have the same basic argument again by the *IAA's...
Hopefully the court will keep tooting it's horn!! This jsut the IP trap we need to get the IP situation under control... then all we have to do is convice lawmakers... their decisions will stick.
I don't know whether it's true or not, but critics claim that the drug companies spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on research.
There's no need to discuss these things theoretically, when all publicly traded companies have to make SEC filings of their financial statements.
According to Pfizer's most recent 10-Q filing, for instance, they incurred "selling, informational, and administrative expenses" of $4,036 million (or 31.5% of revenues), and "research and development expenses" of $1,888 million (or 14.7% of revenues). The former category includes much more than advertising (administrative expenses include accounting, payroll, facilities maintenance, etc.) Nevertheless, total administrative and marketing expenses were only about twice as much as R&D costs.
People like to talk about the rapacious profits of drug companies. Well, go and look at the numbers for yourself: Pfizer's earnings per share are $1.19; Eli Lilly's are $1.66; Merck's are $2.90. By way of comparison, American Electric Power is $1.51, Wal-Mart is $2.41, Staples is $1.40, Home Depot is $2.26, Anheuser-Busch is $2.77.
Drug companies are not massively more profitable than everything else. People who think that they are should simply invest in them and benefit from the price-gouging which they are supposedly inflicting upon the public.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I am not sure this regulates copyrights or patents. Instead, it seems more like the idea that the state is not regulating the patent process or making patent law, but rather purchasing property (via eminant domain) for public projects.
The interesting thing about the current case before SCOTUS is that it is about the city taking private homes to give to a developer who would build facilities for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. The same right that they claim (the right of the state to forcibly buy your land and sell it to another private commercial property) doesnt seem at all different from forcibly buying patents, and indeed, if they are retired or given to the public domain seem to raise fewer Constitutional issues, IMO.
IANAL, of course.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
A patent is just property, and the fact it is granted under federal law shouldn't really matter. (I could be wrong about this). The big fight would be just compensation - all the drug company gets from their patent is profit - so if they are "justly compensated" then they really have nothing to complain about. Except of course "just compensation" under eminent domain jurisprudence is anything but just.
You are right, a patent is just property. It's a government-sanctioned monopoly for a fixed period of time. Governments have taken non-real property for public use many times before. Most notably, the government nationalized the railroads during WWII.
There's precedent for this as several other countries have nationalized drug patents or threatened to do so. One thing's for sure, though: Were this actually done, it would blow open the entire pharmecutical company machine. It would expose for all the world to see the lies about R&D costs, etc. In other words, "just compensation" would be what it actually cost you to make the thing and sell it at a reasonable price, not the trillions of dollars you make from selling it at your ridiculously inflated prices. It would also expose the rampant abuse of the patent system for which OxyContin is Exhibit "A".
Patents? Expire? Holy shit, there's a concept.
When a drug patent comes close to expiring (which they'll prolong), the company generally makes a chemical change to the drug just slight enough such that it can pass as something different (e.g. adding an extraneous methyl group or similar), change the packaging around, maybe make it a 12hr dose instead of 6hrs, and say "WHOA HOLY SHIT NEW DRUG HERE!" and get a new patent. That heartburn/acid reflux drug that I'm totally forgetting the name of now (Nexiium?) is a prime example of this... it's been "reformulated" about three times now, each time is 6-10 years of $billions in profit with basically no new R&D.
That's just the surface, for popular my-job-sucks-and-i'm-fat-so-gimme-a-pill-doc type drugs for the anesthetized middle class in the first world. The really sick things, imho, have to do with the way that they will consider the maximum profit to be extracted from a disease as part of the research process. That means that if there is more money to be made from treatments for an illness than from a cure, guess what comes to market.
Further, the high costs of drugs in the firstworld go primarily to support advertising budgets. Not R&D. Pull the yearly SEC filings for somebody like Merck or Pfizer if you doubt. So that medicine you open your wallet deeply for is primarily going to fund the millions of crappy ball point pens that they fart out to doctors everywhere. (Ask a doctor sometime about the lengths a pharma salesperson will go to. It is unreal.)
Big Pharma does things routinely that make Big Oil or Big Tobacco look like motherfucking saints in comparison. There's a reason I've taken my chemistry degree and run for the I.T. hills to work as a programmer... So maybe my days are spent in a cube, but my days aren't spent in a cube figuring out ways to make money off of the suffering of other human beings.
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