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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.'"
In this case, the specific sequences connected to the disease was not common knowledge beforehand. In addition, you have to come up with relevant primers to amplify the relevant sequence in a specific, yet reproducible, manner to aid detection. I don't think anyone has really tried to challenge the exact scope of the patent, as it might be possible to circumvent it by changing the method or even trying to purify and detect the protein product instead. (However, that would NOT be a trivial thing to do, much harder than the current genetic test.)
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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Why not? If you can forcefully let individual "sell" his property for the greater good, why not a corporation? What is the difference between taking a property from a house- or landowner and a pharmaceutical company?
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.
You assume the United States is the only one with a stupid government.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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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Maybe because Article I, section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to grant exclusive rights to authors and inventors for their respective "writings and discoveries".
>the guy who originally lit the candle didn't spend millions of dollars figuring out how to light it
yeah and the guy who came up with the medical patent didn't learn everything he knew from other people, then get a shitload of government funding to do his research. oh wait, yes he did.
It's interesting that a hospital or Dr. can be sued for watching a patient die and not helping but Pharmaceuticals do this everyday with no repercussions.
I wonder if this could be winnable in a US court.....probably not....
Why isn't this murder? Watching someone die a slow painful death when you could keep them alive is certainly not something that this country claims is humane.
So it's okay to expropriate the work of anyone, as long as he learned from others and was funded by the government?
(Note: that was a reduction to absurdity, not an endorsement of either patents in general, or the patents described. Simmer down.)
I haven't read the article, but if the excepted parts are to be taken seriously -- and I think they are -- the entire argument is rather sophomoric. Pointing to an example of prohibiting Indians to use a traditional remedy because of patents would be a textbook example of an invalid patent (on grounds of prior art). That would show the problems with "a stupid application of medical patents" not that "medical patents as such, take lives".
The other "point" is about drug companies spending more on marketing than research, but what exactly is this supposed to prove (and people do bring it up a lot)? Is the point that if you don't follow some liberal's wet dream about how you're supposed to spend your money, your patent is somehow less worthy?
Yeah, let's start enforcing laws based on our sympathies with the litigants -- banana republic in no time!
Or, presumably, this fact is brought up to somehow imply that a drug company could costlessly redirect money from marketing to research? That won't work either. If the drug became instant knowledge to everyone who might want it, drug companies wouldn't market so much to begin with. In reality, you have to overcome some very steep prejudices of a very protected class of doctors to get them to do it a better way. This means marketing.
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: unlike many people, I freely admit that I simply don't know whether patents are good or bad. However, I do know that we'll never know the answer if people keep muddying up the debate with these misleading claims.
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Its one of the failutes of capitalism- the market is very good at forcing competitive markets to be efficient, but its utterly incapable of making decisions where money is not the only determiner. Thats where government is supposed to step in and fix things. Unfortunately, our current government is so corrupt that it plays ball with the corporations rather than fixes things.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Were it true that the USAn's were under tyrrany, I'd not be able to speak out against my government, nor the corporations who presently have our freedom in a stranglehold.
But I can. And I do. And so does Mr. Stiglitz.
And Joe Stiglitz is a brilliant man. I set up for a talk of his at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania - he was railing aginst the present design of the insurance infrastructure in the US. Meanwhile, where most intellectuals are fine with identifying problems with a system, he talked out an all-out solution.
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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.
You assume the United States is the only one with a stupid government.
And you are too ready to call people "stupid" instead of thinking.
Politicians, broadly speaking, are not stupid. The rewards which flow to a successful politician - money and power - are huge. There is therefore a lot of competition. Stupid people have no chance.
Politicians say stupid things pretty often. That's not because they believe what they're saying; it's because saying those things will get them more votes.
Politicians often pass legislation which harms the people they represent. But the majority of voters don't follow complex issues, so that doesn't affect re-electability. In most cases, the legislation is in response to some special interest. The purpose of passing it is usually to get more campaign donations. It is relatively cheap for large corporations to buy the legislation they want in this way (here's an example).
Our pols are not stupid, just unethical. But our political system seems to favor unscrupulous people.