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Violating A Patent As Moral Choice
kuzmich writes "The Taiwanese government has announced that it will violate patent laws to manufacture a drug that can help fight bird flu virus. In doing so, they have spelled out their reasoning very clearly: 'We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche, it means we have shown our goodwill to Roche and we appreciate their patent. But to protect our people is the utmost important thing'. Not being in Taiwan, this makes me wonder how bad the situation would have to be for some of the other governments to follow a path of violating patent and copyright laws for the benefit of the general population. Are there precedents, procedures for doing so?"
Go Taiwan!
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
"laws are a human institution!" sure they'll get in trouble, but why not do what's best for humanity?
And no vaccine...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well, yeah, but with eminent domain you need pay the market value for what your taking. Since there's already a market value for the drug, one which Taiwan refused to pay, you'll need to come up with another justification.
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RumorsDaily
What has the United States got to do with it?
Roche is a Swiss company.
Reminds me of the scene in Knights of the Old Republic, in the Taris Undercity, where you kill a group of Sith troopers, steal the Sith-deveoped rakghoul antidote from their corpses, bring it to an independent doctor - and receive light-side points because he'll make more of the antidote and give it away freely.
Of course you feel like it's the light-side choice when you're playing the game, but think of the Sith researchers who probably have nothing to do with the empire's evil policies. They aren't getting compensated at all for their efforts (which were intended to save people's lives), and probably don't survive the destruction of Taris. Or are they also in the same category as building contractors on the second Death Star?
Is it reasonable to claim that the Sith researchers as well as the Tamiflu scientists are in a category of people who don't do enough good? (That is, good job for joining a field where your work saves people's lives, but you should be a lot more altruistic when people's lives are, after all, at stake.)
First they make you spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in regulatory rescosts to pass their tests.
Then they allow tort laws to get out of control, letting you get sued for billions.
They make you wait a decade for approval (or not).
They offer you a monopoly on your invention.
Then they take it back so their friends and family in pharmaceuticals can make it with zero of your costs involved.
One interesting question related to this seems to be, at what point does it become ethical for a country to ignore patent laws to save its citizenry? How many people have to be threatened to make it acceptable?
Tiwan is acting in the face of a pandemic. What about less widespread, but equally fatal diseases? For example, why isn't it equally ethical for a country to ignore patent laws for cancer drugs? Why hasn't this already been done for AIDS drugs?
I'm all for this, by the way. I hope this emboldens other countries to do the right thing for its citizens.
"Bird flu has killed at least 60 people in Asia since December 2003" Sixty people died in two years, oh no, if we don't cure it soon we'll all be dead!!! No offence, but is this really something we need to be worrying about?? Doesn't normal flu kill more people per year?
That's sort of true, definitely true in the short term, but you've got to look at the issue from a long term point of view as well. The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today.
Now, one country destroying one patent is not going to eliminate the profit incentive for the drug developers. And in a situation where the drugs are badly needed (I don't know how true that is in Taiwan, but my guess is that since the disease doesn't affect people yet the answer is not very) there's a moral calculus that has to go into making this sort of decision. Is it worth it to hand out free drugs today at the possible cost of not having drugs to hand out at any cost in the future?
You're going to have to look at every individual situation and decide if the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Do you think the current phantom bird flue pandemic is worth risking future drug development over? I'd say you'd have a much better argument for taking away that patents on AIDs drugs than bird flu drugs.
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RumorsDaily
That's inaccurate - there is a *monopoly* value for the drug, which Taiwan refused to pay.
Patents are market distortions - every bit as much as tariffs and trade barriers.
More traditional exercise of emminent domain recognizes similar principles, by the way - the government gets to set the price, the owners of the property can't hold out for more than market value in the event that there is an emergency and sudden demand.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Now, the US Constitution guarantees reasonable compensation for seized property. This doesn't have to be cash. It can be some other equitable consideration.
For example, if Disney would surrender almost all of their old television cartoons and theatrical movies into the public domain (where they should have lapsed years ago), the US could reciprocate and give a *permanent* protection for a few of their most prized revenue source characters: Mickey Mouse and Disney's Ariel (the Little Mermaid). The population could make whatever artistic mashup they wanted from the footage, but they couldn't claim the Mouse as theirs or claim the Mouse speaks for them. If I understand, this is somewhat like the protection Britain has given Peter Pan: it's a special cultural treasure and is handled different from other properties.
Another example is for pharmaceuticals: break an effective AIDS drug patent, and we'll let you keep a certain lifestyle drug like Viagra for a longer period.
Unfortunately, Disney and Pfizer have bought enough Senators to choke the Panama Canal, and so the trade in all of their products will be protected nearly forever anyway, even without surrendering the cultural feedstock and the life-saving inventions to society as a whole.
[
Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws. Let's say that AIDS was declared such a disease. Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
The problem with patent-law violation reasoning is that it seems to be without regard to the future. It's the same logic that leads to other poor policies (who cares about the environment! It's not messed up today).
If patent protection isn't required for drug development, where are the "open source" drugs? It only requires a few billion USD to develop drug lines... I'm sure there is plenty of non-profit, non-patent money to fund that, and so we can do away with the entire patent system.
Oh, and addressing this specifically: if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
This is drug industry propoganda.
The majority of the expenses associated with new drug discovery are actually made in the public sector - by Universities and so forth. In broad outline the story is very similar to the Internet, also developed at public expense.
Now, the private sector does contribute significant additional resources to drug development. HOWEVER, these additional resources are a *fraction* of the total increase in drug prices that result from the patents they are awarded (vs. what the same drugs would cost if prices were governed by a free market.)
The upshot is that if you look at it over the long run, we would be much better off if we violated all the patents, let the patent-dependent drug companies go out of business, and funded an equivalent amount of research in the public sector, making the results available to anyone who wished to sell the resulting drugs on the market.
The research I'm citing here was done by a fellow named Dean Baker. I'll dig up an exact ref if you like.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
But not the marketing costs of the drug.
And regardless, Big Pharma is enormously profitable, for all their claimed "woes".
If the profit margin was slimmer, companies would still make pharmaceuticals. If nobody went into business if they weren't guaranteed pharma-class profits, there'd be a lot of industries that wouldn't exist. Grocery stores, for instance, are inherently low-margin businesses. Yet they haven't looked at their 1-2% profit margins and said, "Feh! I quit!"
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Spoken like one truly ignorant of history.
The fundamental purpose of government is to protect the rights of citizens. And if you think life is more important than rights, you're outvoted daily by the thousands who risk their lives to leave governments who don't protect their rights.
It's all about risk and value add. Grocery stores (to use the parent's example) take almost no risk and add almost no value. They are distributors.
I once saw a study comparing the profit margin of Wendy's (a US hamburger chain) and grocery strores, and then looking at all fast-food resturants and all grocery strores. Because of the value-add component of prepared food, profit margins were shown to be higher.
Go back to Big Pharma. Huge risk. Huge value add. So, huge profit.
Note I'm not passing judgement one way or the other about whether they deserve huge profit, but you didn't seem to understand why some industries have higher profit than others, so I thought I would tell you what the most recent economic research suggests.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
You've piqued my curiosity - if the drug industry doesn't foot the research bill, who does?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Dude, are you retarded? The whole point of government is to do what the private sector will not or cannot do. If the private sector didn't make an AIDS drug, then we can let the government do it. They already do it and then give the research away to the pharmaceutical companies anyway. If you got down off of your libertarian horse for a minute you might be able to see this.
"The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today."
You're right that that's the rationale used to justify the state of things today. And if it had any relation to current practice I'd be prone to agree with you. Unfortunately, there are a few minor data points that tend to indicate the reasoning you outline above consists mostly of horse waste:
Drug research is expensive - nobody argues that. What is arguable, however, is how ethically pharmaceutical companies have acquitted their important social role. On that count, it seems that they've failed miserably, and, just as a criminal deserves to have his legal rights restricted, they deserve to have their patent rights restricted unless they demonstrate that they will not abuse this trust.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
A Patent is a grant of property from the Sovereign (i.e. the legal state, whether that be the "People" or the "Crown" or the "Republic"). Most people define "property" as having a set of legal (usually exclusive) rights to possess, enjoy, and dispose of some thing. All property flows from the Sovereign. The Sovereign either grants it directly (as in a patent for land or intellectual property) or he recognizes it through enacting laws. The "Real" in real estate does not mean true, but litteraly "Royal". You may like to think that its *your* property because of some moral reason (like you earned it or made it yourself), but legally it is only yours because the Sovereign says so through his laws.
Since property and patents are at the pleasure of the Sovereign, the Sovereign is free to revoke it at any time. This is called escheat. In fact, if you die without an heir, your property automatically escheats to the Sovereign.
So, a Soveriegn of a State, can legally revoke any patent of his own granting at any time. Other than because of a treaty obligation, a Sovereign State need not recognize or allow a Patent granted by another state.
Here in the US, our Founders were well aware (and sometimes the personal victims) of the abuses and escheats at the hands of the British Sovereign. So all the above was modified by our constitution which says that property may not be seized except with "due process of law". The Congress has also set up horrible "patent and copyright" laws. Obviously, Taiwan has different laws.
Yes but Eminent Domain, at least in this country, requires just compensation.
So, along with the legal battle, you'd be back to square one.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws. Let's say that AIDS was declared such a disease. Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
And what, exactly, is the benefit of private sector drug development if the drugs aren't sold to the vast majority of the people who need it?
I came here for a good argument
"Risky move, considering the support of the United States is what keeps them from being a province of China..."
The US seems to play both sides of this. USA has no embassy in Taiwan. Unless I missed something, Taiwan is not a UN member. If China actually took action the world, not just the US, would do nothing, just as they did nothing for Tibet and nothing for Hong Kong, just as nobody raised any opposition over the US in Iraq.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The US defends the interest of corporations, not people.
American corporations have interests aligned with patent law.
Get it?
Drug research costs a lot of money. I know Drug companies can get greedy at times, but even if you were running at cost you would be spending tens of millions on research.
If this was a one shot magic bullet cure for cancer, aids, ect I think few would object to the suspension of the normal rules.
Unfortunatly, Aids gets resistant rapidly to the current generation of drugs, so you have to have a constant ammount of research going into it (more money).
But if the drugs are outragiously expensive, people die.
If no one pays the drug companies for the research, they might abandon it and more people would die.
I think a balance needs to be struck, either with government funding or an agreement to sell the current drugs nearer to what they actually cost the companies.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
"Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws."
"Oh, and addressing this specifically: if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed."
Wow, you got us on that one.
Yep, if all the private-sector motivation is removed we'll all just sit here and die. It would never occur to us to group together as citizens in a country, choose a small group of people to run the country (maybe give them a name such as a "government"), instruct them to do what we want, such as putting the necessary research into something which could save the lives of great numbers of us, and giving them the financial means (via taxes) to do so.
We could even come together with other countries to pool our resources.
But no, that could never happen. Nobody would care enough.
We'll all just sit here and die instead.
Wow. People hate the USA because people like you are ignorant, and associate everything you don't like with the USA.
Roche is Swiss.
I would rather see the drug not manufactured than witheld from needy people.
That is certainly an option. If we tear down the patent system, perhaps we can insure that many, many drugs never get developed, and so never manufactured. We all die equally.
Btw, Tiawan can afford the drug. The amount of money in the corruption-fueled grey economy of corrupt officials is more than enough to buy the drugs. Just check out the world-wide corruption studies in The Economist for evidence. It's not about lack of money in Tiawan, but about priorities of spending (bribing MPs is more important than buying drugs - so break the patents).
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
Practicality over ideology, nuggz.
In many specific cases, corporate decision makers may make better choices than the public sector regarding allocation of resources, I don't want to get into a discussion of this as a general principle - however, you seem to have taken this as a religious creed.
I'll raise exactly one counter-example: Should fire departments be run as for-profit enterprises, and only purchase fire trucks in jurisdictions where they can make money charging for fire protection services? Drug research is high tech, but it is a question of public health and safety, and the fundamental decisions should be made with that in mind - so it is more like the fire department, and less like high end consumer electronics.
Beyond that, corporate decision makers are also very corrupt. For example, in the vioxx case, concealing the evidence of deaths, and so forth. In the case of ipods this really isn't a big deal - so the screen scratches now, so what? But when people like that make public health decisions, other people die.
Shifting all drug control resource allocation to the NIH (or a parallel body structured along the same lines) - would not only make better decisions than corporate power centers, it would also make them a transparent way, subject to the full force of peer review. This isn't a 100% guarantee against fraudulent research, but it's a good start!
So, we get better decisions and we get them at a huge costs savings - no need even to rock the boat, we can simply hire the entire existing research apparatus of the american drug industry, let them keep their current generous salaries, and we can spend a tiny fraction of the savings giving them government-employee retirement benefits.
To continue this discussion I'd have to get into the nitty gritty of decisions that pharmaceutical companies have made in the past, and why they have been so disastrous.
If it makes you feel any better, this is really capitalist solution.
Which is a greater distortion of the market: granting patents, or increasing (by about two fold) the money the government spends on life sciences research? Certainly, if the government is making free R&D available to anyone who wants it, that is a market distortion of a kind. In the past, similar market distortions have lead to epic disasters like the Internet, also the modern aerospace indudstry, sattelite communications, am I leaving out any other great mistakes of 20th century America? My god, what fools we where, to meddle with the market!
Anyway, the drugs would still be manufactured by for-profit companies, they'd just be manufactured in a true market, without the market distortions introduced by patents, which is actually a purer form of capitalism, isn't it?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
That's the language all English speaking jurisdictions use. So why choose such an emotionally laden word like violation ??
Australia4 5/top.htm
PATENTS ACT 1990 (Cth)
Chapter 11--Infringement
http://www.scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/1/5
USAs c_sup_01_35_10_III_20_28.html
CHAPTER 28--INFRINGEMENT OF PATENTS
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode35/u
UK
s60 - s71 Infringement
http://www.jenkins-ip.com/patlaw/index.htm
IANAL, but this sounds like an appropriate use of eminent domain.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
How were the mechanisms of blood pressure regulation discovered (picking a drug from that list at random)?
You tell me, you're the one asserting that these are all the result of public research. The burden of proof is on you, but you have presented zero evidence, not even for a single drug. Plus, you're also using an absurd line of reasoning. As if we have to attribute every single research that came before us for our current work. Yes, let's attribute modern research to the doctors dissecting cadavers in the 19th century to help us disocover basic anatomy. Give me a break. We're talking about a DIRECT relationship, not an indirect historical relationship with things that happened eons ago.
The research in fundamental biology has been absolutely *essential* to the development of modern pharmaceuticals - every bit as vital as DARPAnet was to the creation of the internet.
But that's an absurd line of comparison. We are talking about MODERN research, not 100% of past medical research dating back hundreds of years. While you're at it, why not thank the inventor of the semiconductor too, because we couldn't even have the internet without that? Let's thank Michael Farady, too, who discovered the properties of the capacitor. Let's also go back further and thank Newton for discovering many properties of physics that helped us understand these things. Lets also thank Newton's mother, for raising him right.
You are talking about basic knowledge which you learn in medical school, stuff that is a basic part of the curriculum, which is no longer considered "research" (because the research on it ended eons ago), it's just accepted as basic knowledge. Do you still consider basic knowledge of how logic gates work "research"? What about concepts of resistors and capacitors, are those base concepts still considered "research"?
No, and for obvious reasons.
(journal articles)
I was only able to get the text of one of these and that one is just a vague summary of a book this guy wrote. This guy is very self-promoting and it doesn't appear that he's written anything for any credible journals, nor written anything for journals other than op-ed pieces.
"Bird Flu Fears: Is There a Better Way to Develop Drugs?"
This is basically just another opinion piece, without much of anything in terms of statistics. He doesn't even address how much research is done in the public sector for drug companies in it.
"Bigger Than the Social Security Crisis: Wasteful Spending on Prescription Drugs", Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 2005
"The Benefits to State Governments from the Free Market Drug Act," Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, November 2004
Both of these are just proposals for reform in govenrment spending on drug research, but don't actually give stats on how much university research went into drugs.
Look, I'm not going to wade through a bibliography of information, especially considering you've already demonstrated that you can't cite relevent sources. Just give me a *single* good source. Stop wasting my time.
Yes, if it's deemed detrimental to national security, but there's no reason to believe that this happens "all the time", which was the original claim made.
This is trotted out every time this discussion comes up...but no one can ever point to any specific "drug" or treatement that has had this happen. It is always this mystical unknown magic cure that is being with held so that the drug companies can make more money....
Please. Stating this is current practice requires some level of "These guys are doing it with a treatment for disease X". Other wise this statement is no better than me saying I was kidnapped by aliens yesterday.
Gavin Fischer
Well, no, but Roche might feel less inclined to import their drugs to Taiwan in the future. That's not necessarily great for Taiwan.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Like you, I winced when the poster (as others have) overlooked that Roche is Swiss, is that this is no place for an anti-American screed.
However:
That is certainly an option. If we tear down the patent system, perhaps we can insure that many, many drugs never get developed, and so never manufactured. We all die equally.
That is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that the fact that virtually all funding and support for military development comes from the public sector, that the US government is the patent-holder on important security technology patents, has led to a moribund pace of innovation in weapons technology? Hardly. There are many, many ways to fund research and distribution, and your belief that only a crude market model is effective is just that - a principle of faith.
Maybe once a virus or disease is labeled an epidemic then funding should come directly from the government for said development?
If its a threat to a great many people, then perhaps those tax dollars we pay should go to funding a cure for the people.
Maybe it is a crazy idea, but there should be some way to meet at the middle on this one. You have to balance endangering the industries profits versus the common wealth of the people.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
We are now. I know many older Americans skipping or cutting down on their meds because they can't afford them. People without insurance can't afford brand name drugs as it is. The reality is people are dying now because they can't afford insurance and proper health care, including some of those 500 dollar prescriptions.
Perhaps you meant "many, many drugs for people who have insurance will never get developed." Which might be true. All in all, I think having fewer drugs more widely affordable would be a step ahead of where we are today.
If those windfall profits were actually going into R&D, I'd have more sympathy for the big name drug makers. But the bulk of those profits are going toward enhancing shareholder value, making rich people even more rich. Otherwise how can drug makers ship drugs to Canada who then sells them back to our own citizens for less than we can buy them here? Canadian pharmacies are still making a profit. The only way that math works is the certain knowledge that we're getting boned on drug prices.
What you say is true from one narrow perspective but not on the macro scale. Drugs are likely only to be the first patents ignored on the world market. Technology might be next. Perhaps you've noticed the really hot tech doesn't premiere here anymore. The new buzz phrase is "No word on when it will be available in the US." Maybe never.
As our patent system becomes ever more litigious and retarded more countries are going to be tempted to bust technology patents for use in their own country.
And, of course, we can't take on patent reform without first making sure all those people in bankruptcy because of catastrophic medical expenses go to credit counseling and pay back their credit card bills and that we shield those poor gun makers from legal liability. Those are obviously hugely important compared to poor people dying, and old people we're almost dead anyway, but I'm sure our Republican servants of the people will get to that patent thing just any day now.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So of the ~180,000+ patents granted a year, only about 120 or so are made secret? Yeah, that's "all the time."
Source: U.S. Patent Statistics Chart
What about "Corporations are global citizens and have to look out for everyone, not just their already too huge profits."
The drug would be affordable for Taiwan to treat the DISEASE, but that isn't what they are looking for.
So far this "epidemic" has claimed 60 lives. While it is tragic for those families, it isn't a return of the plague.
The disease is not currently jumping from bird -> human except in cases of HEAVY contact, and there is no human -> human jumping.
In previous "bird flu" epidemics, illegal versions of the drugs were used to treat birds by poor farmers rightfully fearing losing their livelihood. As a result, the remaining disease was resistant to the treatment, and previous treatments were no longer valid. There is an article in this month's Fortune on the issue...
Basically, if you keep the price high, people (or their governments) will pay for it to save lives, but not over use it to the point of treating birds...
It's not simple, and that's without debating the merits of our current private sector drug industry...
Alex
You mention the need for patents in order to protect "the future"
I think you are underestimating the possibilities of this bird flu.
it could wipe out world stock markets for a decade.
Its in your interests for all governments to catch this one early and effectively, whatever methods they use.
If it appears, then there will be desperate attempts to stop it, for example you can be sure that any country that has a pandemic and is isolateable will have anything that moves over its boarders terminated with extreme predudice. Maybe the rest of the world might agree to wipe the place out with nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately if a human transmissible version of this virus appears then even this will be pointless. Only half a million Americans died in the 1918 pandemic and 50 million worldwide. There was no air travel at the time so it wouldnt be suprising if these figures were a hundred times higher for a pandemic today, it would be everywhere within a week.
The USA is not exactly shining with glory over its disaster preparedness planning since the debacle in New Orleans. I hope that the federal government that many seem to so despise is prepared to manufacture a flu vaccine for you personally. In the UK the government has just announced contracts to make 120 million doses of vaccine, of course they wont be able to make them all for the first wave, but it should be three months before the second wave and that should allow time for at least the surviving medical staff, army and police to get a dose.
Mind you life is full of risks, the media delights in scaring us with the latest one.
Some we live with and over time grow complacent about. Californians have the next big earthquake, New Orleans have had their Leves breached and the Kashmiris have their earthquake. It is instructive to compare the effect of catastrophe on different places, a thousand deaths in Louisiana, 45 thousand in Pakistan and few if any from the little quakes in California.
The thing that appears to have made a difference in these cases is the degree of preparedness. Californian building codes verses Pakistani ones (admittedly they couldnt afford much better ones) and New Orleans mostly got out in time. Also the tsunami which would have had much less effect if people had an hours warning to walk inland.
A bird flu inflenza is a very real threat, by this time next year a third of us could be dead.
Pandemic illnesses and in fact most viral illnesses have been found to have come from cross species transmission, their danger comming from the fact that they have slowly mutated in an animal species into something that the human immune system knows nothing of. The virus itself may once have transfered from human to bird. So when it crosses the interspecies boundary we have no remembered defence, this is the case with bird flu. Up to a third of the individuals who have caught it directly from birds have died. All that remains is for an individual to be carrying a normal easily transmitted human virus to catch bird flu and for the two kinds of virus to exchange components and you get a human influenza that carries the nasty behaviour of bird flu. try a google search for antigenic drift or just have a look at CDC.
I dont know what the risk is of the two virii cross pollinating in this way - but the microbiologists seem worried that this will happen. You would have to find out what the probability of this is before you can say whether a pandemic is imminent and I dont think anybody has reliable figures on this. Governments seem to think it inevitable.
However consider the known risk factors that the media get excited over that we all live with eg Nuclear power station melt down, heart disease, cancer, food dyes, various slightly suspect chemicals in products we come in daily contact with (that give a rat cancer if you feed the rat its own body weight of the chemical), pesticides, being run over by a bus, being struck by lightning etc
- none of these are likely to destroy our
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
FYI, patents are a personal monopoly granted by the government, not a natural law property right. They are not anything like regular property that has natural physical limits in supply and demand and no expiration date. Properties are about controlling limited resources, not about controlling people. They are not a valad property right any more than slaves on the plantation in 1850, and considering all the people they kill by locking out cures for diseases, and life saving innovations that were likely to happen in natural progression of things anyhow, they are agruably worse.
The most crazy part is that people say they promote R&D when patents really kill it. Patnets skew R&D so that researchers don't collaberate, and so that cheap inexpensive pratical cures to diseases are shuned and even attacked.
Seriously, if you steal my car I think I would be very violated and deprived of my transportation, but if you make a copy of it - hell have 10! The notion that copying and immitation is a form of stealing is bullshit morality, and the people who impose it are really the ones who are immoral.
IP is NOT property, and anyone who says otherwise has a really inflated idea of how much a "critical proprietary idea" is worth in a free market. Hint: it's not what the SELLER thinks it's worth - it's what the BUYER thinks it's worth.
If you have a "one-in-a-million" idea, and you can't use it to beat competitors in business (even if they copy the idea), or someone else comes up with the same idea independently, then it wasn't really a one-in-a-million idea, was it?
Tamiflu was developed by Roche, a Swiss company, with research done in the UK, Japan, Switzerland, the USA, and -- quite a surprise to you and those like you, I'm sure -- China. Your muddleheaded jingoism has no basis in fact.
"The pharmaceutical companies, for obvious (but shameful) reasons, opposed the introduction of generics in Brazil." I guess you are talking about profit here? If their drugs were more profitable they would have incentive to create even more drugs. Is 20 years (a patent term) that long to wait to freely reap the benefits of the research? You are telling me there is something Brazil just can't live without, for free (or for manufacturing costs (generics)) that didn't even exist 20 years ago? All they are doing is assuring that in the future even less drugs becomes available.
The system we are under today is not the best, but how a free-for-all would help I have no idea. These drugs that are so badly wanted today would never have been created in the first place if everyone got to just get them for manufactoring cost only.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
You bring up an interesting point. Look at it this way: The Taiwanese government, charged with the protection of their citizens, and taxing them for that very purpose, never saw fit to invest in their own safeguards against plagues like the bird flu. Nor does the Taiwanese government see fit to pay now the cost of such an investment, which Roche made for its own reasons.
So the Taiwanese government won't save its own citizens, and won't pay someone else to save its own citizens, but will gladly steal the results of someone else's work to save its own citizens. Doesn't it seem like Taiwan is behaving badly?
You do know that if you life in America and make this arguement you are an immense hypocrite. America was built on patented european invetions that Americans used without renumerations to the appropriate patent holder.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Now, the NIH has made a great many mistakes, but if you think the NIH even *approaches* the corruption and incompetence of the drug industry, you're from Mars.
A government agency is more competent than private industry? You've never worked for government, have you?
at the same time, government financing of R&D should, as a policy question, be expanded to take up the slack.
So, instead of the funding being voluntary (through private industry research) you want it to be involuntary (through tax dollars). Thanks, but I think government taxing authority is far too out of control as it is; I certainly don't want to give them more of my paycheck.
*is it* a capitalist solution, or not?
Of course it isn't. That's obvious on its face.
I stand by my statement that public financing of R&D is less of a market distortion than are patents, and therefore is more capitalist. Why and in what way am I wrong?
That's a contradiction in terms. Capitalism requires voluntary transactions; government taxes at the point of a gun, an inherently involuntary transaction. Worse, no market forces of any sort are used to decide the distribution of resources, including manpower (your bureaucrats certainly aren't going to be the best people for the job).
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
So the Taiwanese government won't save its own citizens, and won't pay someone else to save its own citizens, but will gladly steal the results of someone else's work to save its own citizens. Doesn't it seem like Taiwan is behaving badly?
Are you saying that the government of other countries should be denied the same policy choice that the US made in the 1800s?
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
State monopolies are not about efficiency my good sir, they're about high-quality service and providing said service to everyone, even when it's completely inefficient to provide said service.
State monopolies are about making service available to the most people with the best QoS, they're about reaching 100% or as close as possible, not about reaching the 20% that lead to viable service economically and leaving 80% in the dust because you consider it costs too much to provide them said service.
State monopolies are about long-term vision, 10+ years when not 50+ years, when most private structures' "long term" is barely 5 years.
This is why most european rail service actually work at the moment even if they don't bring in much money, while UK rail service blows and is overpriced.
Now I don't mean that govt/state monopolies shouldn't try to be efficient, it's in fact one of their duties as users of public tax money, they owe it to the whole population of the country (said population more or less being their shareholders), but it's not and should never be their first goals. The first and most important goals of state monopolies should always be quality and reach.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
> Tribal warfare causes very few problems in Africa.
Strange. My native Kenyan friend tells me otherwise.
Are you sure you are not one of these policically correct fools busily picking up "white man's burden"?
Jerks like you will put a price in dollars on fucking anything, even your grandmother.
And you find nothing wrong with this.
Ever wondered why people are willing to die hurling airliners into your skyscrapers????
You've been had. Dow did not make that statement. Have a look at the wikipedia entry for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_Disaster . In particular, scroll down to the bottom and read about "The Yes Men". The statement you quoted was a hoax.