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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?"
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
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.
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.
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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
"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.
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Taxpayers through university research
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Private funds (look at all the money raised by fund-raising for AIDS, breast cancer, MS, etc)
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Charities, philanthropy, etc.
The drug companies have a much lower efficiency in terms of money spent per researcher in their labs vis. the people doing research at universities for their post-docs, so when you factor that in, the inbalance is even greater towards the public sector.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.
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.
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
What about "Corporations are global citizens and have to look out for everyone, not just their already too huge profits."
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
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????