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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.'"
The real question is what would be a better way to reward inventors than intellectual property arrangements. IP doesn't reward creation of an invention-but its restriction. It is clear that major corporate interests have abuse IP protection in various ways. The problem is that an alternative system isn't exactly obvious. The economist Henry George proposed replacing the system of patents and copyrights with a system of prize awards over 100 years ago. However, determining what inventions should be rewarded is still going to be difficult.
1. If a researcher looses a monopoly on one patent, but in turn gains access to 10 million other patents - then that is a net gain for invention and for business, not a net loss. The facts bear that out. For example, how most the new drug innovation was happening in India where they don't have patents on drugs, or the less proprietary x86 architecture that took the market by storm in spite of it's design flaws.
2. Patents do not change the demand for invention and R&D, they only distort the market and cause it to center around invention controls instead of invention related services. Well, large companies, lawyers, and government are good at controlling things. Inventors are good at inventing things, so patents do really not help inventors or small lean innovators.
3. To control inventions requires physical coercion and violence, and patents are very violent. Like how they arguably held back safety devices in cars for 20 years while millions died needlessly, and like how attempts of patent enforcement in Africa have likely led to over a million unneeded AIDS related deaths. Also, DDT was banned within months of its patent running out, freon too, to make room for bigger markets. But at least the freon one can't be attributed to 50 million malaria deaths.
4. In the future, technology is likely to bring production back into the home thru 3d printers and nanotechnology. IMHO, patents will require more violence and more government micro-regulation than ever in order to be secured.
5. A side effect of the patent system is that researchers who share research and innovation between companies are punished. It creates a strong disincentive against collaboration. It forces innovators to spend orders of magnitude more on R&D and causes them and their research to be micromanaged. So patents drive up the cost of R&D by orders of magnitude, drive down quality, and then now they say "well, we need patent monopolies to recover all these costs".
6. People tend to think that having all these incompatible parts and all these incompatible interfaces on every single car, cell phone, and consumer product - is just a normal part of a free market economy. I speculate that it is not, and that patents encourage these distortions in addition to all the waste and unneeded obsolescence that goes with it.
7. People tend to think that having expensive pharmaceuticals with all sorts of strange chemical side effects is just a normal part of a free market economy. In addition they think that the shunning natural cures, herbs, and vitamins is a normal function of modern medicine and science. I speculate that it also is not, but another distortion caused by patents.
8. Patents are not property anymore than slaves on the plantation are. Just cause someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is.
In sum, patents don't help inventors, but distort markets to work against them and even punish and isolate them. They are violent, genocidal, coercive, unproductive, inefficient, and drive down profit, quality, and compatibility across markets everywhere. The future for patents does not look promising, but rather to be one of millions of US elderly suffering from high costs and strange chemichal side effects on their medication, and one of a military police state required to enforce them as things like 3d printing and nanotechnology force the commoditization of invention.
Ask Monsanto. They have patents on over 11,000 crops, only about 10% of which are genetically modified. The rest are natural varieties, just as God / Nature created them.
Of course, that could be because everyone that had anything to do with that aspect of the government at that time was a former Monsanto or former Monsanto subsidiary executive (for instance, John Asscroft, former Attorney General).
When you "own" the government, in time you own everything else, too.
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