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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?"
Patent laws are far more important than human lives; what gives them the right to do this?
Just kidding, of course. Good for Taiwan. Patent laws should not cause the death of people.
They have their priorities straight. Stopping a potential pandemic is more important than not stepping on a businessman's toes.
It seems to me that in a case such as this, it would be perfectly acceptable to invoke the principle of Eminent Domain. If this isn't a situation that involved the public's interest, I don't know what is!
No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, isn't it, eh? Beautiful plumage!
This happened routinely during WWII in the US with patents and forced licensing agreements for technology deemed crucial to the war effort. Even my own great grandfather's manufacturing business (springs) was confiscated due to his ethnic background.
Good luck to 'em all, I say; saving lives trumps patents.
Wikipedia sez:
...an interpretive statement, the Doha Declaration, was issued in November 2001, which indicated that TRIPs should not prevent states from dealing with public health crises. Since then PhRMA, the United States and, to a lesser extent, other developed nations, have been working to minimise the effect of the declaration. TRIPs provides for "compulsory licencing", which allows a national government to issue a licence for the production of drugs without the consent of the patent owner as long as those drugs are primarily for the domestic market. A 2003 agreement loosened the domestic market requirement, and allows developing countries to export to other countries where there is a national health problem as long as drugs exported are not part of a commercial or industrial policy [1]. Drugs exported under such a regime may be packaged or colored differently to prevent them from prejudicing markets in the developed world.
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
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.
Roche is Swiss. I'm sure China, mainland or Taiwanese, quakes in fear at the thought of the Swiss navy launching an assault.
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.
[
The WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) allows compulsory license of medicines for public health reasons. The Wikipedia entry gives a decent overview in the "access to essential medicines" section.
This is a hot topic in the international trade community for developing countries, especially in relation to AIDS drugs.
It doesn't appear that Taiwan honors foreign patents via treaty: http://www.bpmlegal.com/pctco.html http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/plt/ , but I may be wrong.
The US has done basically the same thing with US patents which have "national security" implications. In the US, the Constitutional authority for patents lies in Congress, so Congress is perfectly free to decide whether patent protection should/is offered for such things. I don't profess to know such specifics about Taiwan.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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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.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!
Yes. St. Thomas Aquinas addresses this in ST II-II.66.7. "It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need." Although this would not be a "secret" taking (it's in the headlines!), the principle still replies. IF (and I stress the "if" because I have no idea what the price tag was) Roche is truly being unreasonable in their demands, and IF (ditto) the need to act now is truly extreme, then the Taiwanese government does have the right to act in violation of the patent.
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
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
Charles Schumer, the senior senator from NY, has been big on this in the last month (and has been big on affordable drug policies for years...) First he said it was inexusable that Roche was putting their profits ahead of widespread safety, and last week said that Roche was being unreasonable in refusing to take steps to make the drug more widely available (not stepping up production, not meeting with other potential producers). Schumer threatened Congressional action to ignore the patent if there was no action from Roche in 30 days. Now it sounds like Roche relented, at least a little in the US market, and has agreed to step up production and at least talk with other potential producers about licensing.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I was told that Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's discovery that peptic ulcers could be frequently cured by antibiotics instead of maintained with proton-pump inhibitors was suppressed until some major patent or another ran out and the discovery was no longer a threat to someone's monopoly.
But that's a rather weak case, so never mind.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Gah, I can't sleep. I didn't even notice this response and it's the best among the lot.
When I said "public" I meant to include non-profits as well as "private" universities; non-indutry would be a better term - in my lab this equals about 20% of federal funding, which is probably about typical, although in cancer research is it much, much higher.
I would say that you should also include a variety of tax-breaks - often at the State level - which are given in some way theoretically conditioned on R&D, as non-industry funding. State governments, or funds that pass through state agencies in one way or another (from tuition, etc.) also pay, indirectly, a varying but sometimes significant portion of the cost for research at some state universities, the accounting is not transparent so this is much more difficult to tally. So the State share is non-zero, but hard to say how big it really is.
Industry also spends a significant amount on R&D actually located in Universities, but I'm pretty sure they include that in their filing. My lab gets hardly any industry money but my Dad gets a fair amount.
On the other hand, Columbia (my institution) in particular makes a fair amount of money from patent income, and it would be highly disingenuous of me to include that in the "non-industry" R&D total, given what I am proposing.
Finally, the federal number has not grown as much as I would have expected, I haven't actually seen these numbers for a few years, I'm pretty sure that the Federal pharma R&D was bigger when last I looked.
Anyway, thank you for the correction, but you can change "most" to "comparable amounts" in my original post it doesn't really change anything.
Your prediction is simply not holding up to recent history - my evidence here in anecdotal, but when a scientist develops a new drug, they start up a little company - so that they can sell the patent to Pfizer. For them to actually make the drug themselves depends on assumptions regarding low cost of entry which simply do not hold in this case. The result of this is that we have a sustained oligopoly which will not fix itself through competition, and is in fact becoming more entrenched.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Do you know why Roche, and so many other pharmaceutical companies, are based in Switzerland? Because when they were founded there Switzerland had no intellectual property laws and did not recognize any such foreign laws. So Roche, Ciba, and the rest set themselves up in Switzerland ripping off patented formulas from the UK and elsewhere.
Now that Roche have got themselves a nice protectionism program going with the patent system, they don't think any other company, or nation in this case, should do to them what they did to their UK competitors. If any of the founding bandits were still haunting the boardroom at Roche, they would recognize the supreme justice of the current situation.
What is particularly unfortunate is that many drugs (including tamiflu and the superior inhaled drug relenza) were invented by relatively small biotechs. (OK, Gilead isn't small any more, but Biota is *tiny*). Small biotechs are absolutely reliant on the fees and royalties they generate through licensing their inventions to Big Pharma, who have the money to get them through the FDA approval process and marketed.
Break a patent for Roche or GSK, they'll be annoyed but hardly notice the change in cash-flow. The biotech, however, will lose its sole cash-flow life-line. Biota are collaborating with Japanese pharma Sankyo to produce a second-generation antiviral for influenza that looks like being needed once-weekly for both prophylaxis and treatment. Be a real pity to destroy promising biotech-level research like that by cutting profits at the Big Pharma end of town.
Disclaimer: Yes I work for a biotech - own shares in them too.