Patent Attorney On Why We Need To Rethink Intellectual Property

Techdirt called our attention to an interesting video of patent attorney Stephan Kinsella's presentation on 'Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely.' It's a long presentation, but well worth the time to watch. There is also an ongoing series of posts discussing intellectual property rights on Techdirt for additional reading.

Comments

Re:Old concept in a new world

[QuantumRiff]

Drug companies love to talk about the cost of developing their drugs, but they easily spend more money Marketing their drugs than they do developing them. If there drugs are so good and wonderfull, shouldn't they sell themselves?

This gives much more information.

Re:Old concept in a new world

[WaltBusterkeys]

The millions and billions are collective research, not just solely put on one product. It's throwing money at the wall, waiting for some to stick, Yes, because it's impossible to know in advance which concept will work. There is no way to know that Molecule #1512 will be the one that will become a successful therapy, and that #1-#1511 will be failures. Investigating the first 1511 is an absolute prerequisite to finding out that #1512 is the one that will work. You call it "throwing money at the wall," but that's the only practical way to do drug research these days. You start with a bunch of compounds that look like possible candidates, then slowly weed out the ones that don't work or cause unacceptable side-effects or otherwise aren't promising.

If there were a way to know in advance which drugs would work then nobody would waste time looking at the unsuccessful ones.

Re:Old concept in a new world

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

But if there is not a perceived investment opportunity, many drugs sold for high prices today (and lower prices tomorrow) would never have been developed.

This is true, but maybe if we allocated our tax dollars better we would have better drugs yet. The way things are now, a lot of the research is already funded by tax dollars, even though private companies end up with the patents. They also pass up avenues for research that might result in cures, which are much less profitable than treatments.

The drug industry and health industry in general is a situation where the government interferes with the free market by enforcing patents and subsidizing some research and restricting other research. The problem is not necessarily government interference, but the fact that the government interference is directed by lobbyists making campaign contributions instead of by representatives acting in the best interests of the people.