Should a New Technology Change the Patent System?

linuxizer writes "Congress seems poised to turn an effort to create a pathway for generic biotech drugs, such as Remicade, into the exact opposite. Instead of the 5-year protection that traditional pharmaceuticals get, or the 0-year protection that the FTC recommends, the bill offers 12-year exclusivity with renewability for minor changes. The issue is highly charged, with activists waging a campaign to change the bill. Yet it also raises interesting questions for other technologies. To what extent do the traditional contours of patent law need to change in response to new technologies with a different set of market realities (biotech drugs are 22 times more expensive on average, and development costs for generics will be substantially higher) and in what direction? Need every new technological category get its own patent rules, and how do those rules get decided?"

Comments

This is Slashdot

[FlyingBishop]

Of course not, unless by 'change' you mean 'abolish.'

But for these sorts of pharmaceuticals, I have to question the wisdom of allowing patents at all. Nobody really properly understands how most of this works, it's almost entirely statistics. That's not to trivialize the importance of new drugs, but patent exclusivity will discourage widespread use, reducing the statistical information we can glean from the new drugs, and making combining treatments much less safe.

Of course, the same argument works fairly well against the current pharmaceutical patent system, but again, this is Slashdot.

Re:People with the Money Call the Shots

[dkleinsc]

Reminds me of a great moment by Dr House: When he explains to his audience that Vogler's new drug will work really well, because the old drug worked really well, and nothing significant has changed, just minor changes in order to keep the patent protection.

Re:Recoup period

[_LORAX_]

So make companies "buy in" to patent protection. Default is 2 years and for 5 million/year they can buy up to another 8 years of protection.

Re:Recoup period

[RiotingPacifist]

yeah its not like FTC know anything about trade! (did you even read their argument.)

Do you have any idea how long it takes to get drugs approved for use by the public? drugs (like software) can't simply be copied and resold, if you develop a new drug you have a good 3/4 years of no competition while a competitor gets reverse engineers it and gets approval for his version, after that you have the fact that your drugs are tried and tested and you've been producing it for 3/4 years. Patents are useful in many sectors, but medicine is even less one of them than software (especially when you consider the human cost).

IF the drug approval process was faster AND it was easy to reverse engineer drugs THEN patents are needed in medicine (probably 5 years), but until then the drug company's can shove the any proposal up their respective asses!

What about ARM?

[JSBiff]

The problem with your reasoning is that it leaves no possibility for a Research and Development for-profit business. Take ARM CPUs for example. Their business model is that they develop designs for real CPU cores (which is, in a sense, a real product, but in another sense, is not). But, they are a 'fabless' semiconductor company - they don't *build* or directly sell any actual products (except for, probably, some demo/marketing units which they ship to manufacturing partners).

They license their CPU designs out to manufacturing partners, who integrate them into all sorts of devices - cell phones, game consoles, netbooks, DVRs, DVD/Blu-Ray players, automated manufacturing devices, medical devices, etc. Anything which needs a CPU could potentially use an ARM CPU design.

So, what is so *wrong* about the ARM business model? I don't think most people would call them a patent troll, and yet without patents, they would collapse overnight. But, by your (rather vague) definition, they wouldn't likely get patent protection?

Re:What needs to change

[Attila Dimedici]

I would agree with this in part, as long as the attempt to sell the idea to a company counts. A classic example of where the patent system works as intended is the intermittent windshield wiper. The car companies worked to develop an intermittent wiper and were unable to do so. An independent inventor developed the idea and tried to sell it to them. They asked him to demo the idea before they would pay for it. Once they saw how it worked, they developed their own and tried to claim "obviousness". He sued them and collected significant damages.