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Economists Argue Patent System Should Be Abolished
nukem996 writes "Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published a paper arguing that the American patent system should be abolished. The paper recognizes the harm the current patent system has caused not only to the technology sector but the health sector as well."
You, Sir, has clearly not RTFP!
Please at least read page 13 of the paper, and throw out your well preserved assumptions of how the world works.
- I'll give you a taste of page 13:
"There are four things that should be born in mind in thinking about the role
of patents in the pharmaceutical industry. First, patents are just one piece of a
set of complicated regulations that include requirements for clinical testing and
disclosure, along with grants of market exclusivity that function alongside patents.
Second, it is widely believed that in the absence of legal protections, generics would
hit the market side by side with the originals. This assumption is presumably based
on the observation that when patents expire, generics enter immediately. However,
this overlooks the fact that the generic manufacturers have had more than a decade
to reverse-engineer the product, study the market, and set up production lines.
Lanjouw’s (1998) study of India prior to the recent introduction of pharmaceutical
patents there indicates that it takes closer to four years to bring a product to market
after the original is introduced—in other words, the fifi rst-mover advantage in pharmaceuticals
is larger than is ordinarily imagined. Third, much development of
pharmaceutical products is done outside the private sector; in Boldrin and Levine
(2008b), we provide some details. Finally, the current system is not working well:
as Grootendorst, Hollis, Levine, Pogge, and Edwards (2011) point out, the most
notable current feature of pharmaceutical innovation is the huge “drought” in the
development of new products."