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Nobel Laureate Attacks Medical Intellectual Property
An anonymous reader writes "Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was fired by the World Bank blasted drug patents in an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled 'Scrooge and intellectual property rights.' 'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous.'"
If there's one area where I think Eminent Domain applies, it is to this sort of "property." If the pharmaceutacals "own" a cancer drug, an AIDS drug, a heart valve palsy drug, then fucking TAKE it from them and give it to the world. If they have to be compensated under eminent domain laws, then give them a twenty year extension on their stupid penis pills, their fat-buster pills, or their toenail fungus cures. If they can do it with your house to make a bypass, then they should be able to do it with something that will really benefit society.
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I choose to disagree with this until someone gives me some numbers on this that support the contrary. It seems like FUD designed to tie us to the notion of IP. I don't buy it because if we take the RIAA, for example, and hold them up to this lens of "needing" them so that the music industry will continue to be profitable and produce music, we ought to all see rather clearly that this is not the case. The only thing the RIAA does for the music industry is put distributors on a pedestal for distributing media that they don't even generate. That's exactly contrary to the original reason for IP, or rather, patents and copyright.
If we look back in time to the printing press we see that copyrights were granted to protect content producers from content distributors. This was done so as to not discourage content producers because their work could be ripped off so easily. If we look at how the IP laws are abused these days we can see that, more often than not, the distributors are using the IP laws to inappropriately create monopolistic distribution channels. Which is just a complicated way of saying they get to control the entire supply, thus artificially inflating demand (prices) beyond what it ought to be.
On another note, TFA proposes an alternative to the patent system for drug research: the prize system. Off-hand, this seems feasible and proper given our role in the global society. It also seems similar to the original intent of the patent/copyright IP systems, where creators of IP are rewarded and distributors just distribute.
You lost your right to say that Americans are free when you didn't butcher Dubya and string up the supreme court for imposing their own opinions on a set of election results that were not even remotely clear, and refusing to even hear the appeals of the tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters that were barred from voting just for being poor and having names that were too similar to those of a convicted criminals in other states. That you don't lynch-mob government officials that engage in gerrymandering is proof enough that you don't even care if your elections are even remotely representative. Even allowing the existence of "lobbying" (AKA bribery) is an embarassment for any nation in which it occurs. America is not free, it is not democratic, and it is by far the stupidest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Consider this: it is the only non-Muslim nation where there are actually a sizable number of people that question the value of literacy... and are willing to elect leaders that lack it.