If greedy gloom-n-doom corporations threatening to provide less content if they don't get at least a billion dollars a week in ad revenue make good their threat, that'll just mean more opportunities for indie writers and producers.
Who is going to pay the indie writers and producers (and cameramen, gaffers, runners, editors, graphic artists, special effects artists, caterers, electricians, and grips) if there is no revenue?
What's your favorite online source for news? What would it look like if all of the content that was paid for via ad revenue was removed? And no fair counting someone scraping or blogging their version of a story a reporter was paid to generate as not being paid for by ad revenue.
Would you be willing to accept that "expensive culture that requires lots of full time work by professionals" won't persist without a way to monetize it?
I realize people make TV shows for free. But they don't make five seasons of "The Wire" for free. They don't make "Game of Thrones" for free. At the other end of the budget scale they don't make "Archer" for free either.
My favorite authors might still be writing books if no one was buying them, but they would be writing them a lot less frequently as a hobby in their spare time while they worked a normal day job.
It can be parallelized, and I'm certain that printers optimized for the different parts would speed things up a bit, but getting the process up to 1 car per week would still require 15-20 printers instead of one. Somehow I see them switching to molded parts wherever practicable if they start production.
It's pretty hard to imagine that fundamentalists could outsmart biologists who, after all, also have access to this tool to make a cure.
It's always easier to break stuff than it is to fix it. There are plenty of viruses and bacteria out there that we can't touch despite years of trying. I don't see much chance of rapidly taking out a novel pathogen except with RNA-interference or antisense treatments, and those have had a checkered history so far.
The article breezily mentions creating a genome from scratch, but it's not really that easy. Say you wanted to use the services mentioned in the article to create smallpox, a 186 kb (kilobase) virus, from scratch. Genome compiler software would be a way to design the project on a computer, but that's about it. The services mentioned in the article will certainly synthesize oligonucleotides into genes (100 to 10000 base pairs) and put those genes or operons into vectors and ship them to you, but building a whole virus would be a long involved project and would get special attention. Even having them just make parts of smallpox genes would probably throw up red flags in the software; it would be pretty trivial for checks like that to be automatic. But say you get your genes or operons in the mail. You would then need to assemble all of those bits into one genome. That involves a lot of intermediary steps of cutting and pasting, replicating (first by a PCR machine, then in host organisms when the pieces get too big for PCR), purifying, and then cutting and pasting again. Fairly standard molecular biology, but harder with such long pieces of DNA. Then it's off to the biosafety level 5 lab to package the DNA into chickenpox viral capsids or find some other way to get your viral genome into human cells intact. Then you'll need to culture the virus in (presumably) human cells, yet another skill set.
All in all you would need to have access to a lot of the equipment and skills found in molecular biology and virology labs to get the job done, not just mail order DNA.
I've been thinking it would be an interesting experiment for an app to fork its business model:
Start with the traditional advertising space/personal info revenue model. Calculate the average advertising/personal info revenue per user, offer a privacy-assured ad-free version of the app at that price. Also offer a "free" ad-supported version of the app. Then continually adjust that price to keep the ratio of paying users to "free" users at 1:1.
Notice many of these patents are from the 90s and even 80s or before.
Patent claims expire after 20 years with few exceptions.
if they do have a product give them three years to develop it so most of these troll patents would have expired. I'm talking patents on methods and other broad range patents like gestures and such.
So if you invent something you have to get it into a product on the market within three years or you lose the patent? What if you don't have the rights to the rest of the widget your invention applies to? Also, who defines what is or isn't a broad range patent? It seems like a definition that is made by popularity in the marketplace, probably years and years after the patent was filed.
Also force them to file within 12 months of a competing product being release.
That would kill off these massive lawsuits for 5 to 10 years of infringement before they even filed.
What if it takes more than a year for you to find out that your invention is a part of their product? You don't have to disclose all of the IP involved in making a widget to the public to sell the widget.
And that is where "induced infringement" comes in - where several parties together infringe on a claimed method in some coordinated manner. Defining "coordinated" is a process that is still getting hashed out in the courts, I think. I've been wondering about where the line is for a few years because any reasonable boundary should allow an end run around the patents on genetic diagnostic tests:
1. Party A sequences your genome, sends it to you.
2. Party B is a website that supplies free downloadable software that will read the file and score any tests you are interested in. Academic labs have been doing this for some tests for a while now already.
Neither part in isolation is protectable by patent. So long as there's no coordination between the two, once you have your genome sequenced all of your genetic tests (except for ones that require a new sample from a particular tissue, like the ones that are going to become common for cancer diagnostics) will be free for the rest of your life.
The licensing terms were exhausted once the seed was sold to the elevator but patent exhaustion doesn't mean that the patent just goes away. If i buy a used widget that is under patent I can't be held to the terms of the license under which it was sold, but I can be sued if I start making copies of the widget and sell them.
Spot on (including the mouseover text), but I doubt news organizations would push their apps so hard unless their monetization of mobile visits required the apps Ads in the sidebar are too small when you load the paper with a normal webbrower; if you zoom in to read the article the ads will get pushed off the screen. No clicks, no revenue for the paper. Using the app means the right ads get sent to your platform and stay where you can see them, whether you like it or not. Hopefully they'll figure out that bad solutions to the problem of getting people to view ads just inspire draconian solutions on our end, like flashing ads spread all over the page inspired adblock and flashblock.
They didn't get your password, a service Yahoo set up for developers conveniently allows hackers to get your session cookie. For whatever reason, they haven't patched it.
1. Drug companies spend the bulk of their R &D money on new drugs, with some money spent on new indications for old drugs. On average that comes out to $4 billion per approved drug for the large companies. That is not an estimate of what someone thinks a clinical trial or an NDA application should cost, or a list where some drugs are "outliers" and thus ignored, it's what's on publicly traded companies' balance sheets. The numbers aren't padded: stock holders hate seeing money going to R&D because they know that in pharma R&D is a black hole that may or may not cough up something worthwhile 5 or 10 years from now. If anything pharmas would try to hide R&D spending in the marketing column.
2.Marketing increases the profit per dose, but not the price. I won't fight you on drugs being marketed/prescribed inappropriately and the overall cost to society that entails, but if an advertising campaign wasn't bringing in more dollars than it cost they would shut it down. The price is set pretty simply: the highest value for the equation (price) x ( number of doses we can sell to this customer at this price). Justification of the price is an afterthought, and cutting down waste in various layers of the system would certainly make it more efficient, but that would just concentrate the dollars in fewer hands, not lower the price. Prices (in our system) gets lowered by competition.
3. "Me too" drugs and minimal improvements. Most of the time that "me too" drug was already deep into clinical trials by the time the first-in-class was approved. Sometimes it was patented before the first in class was. The drugs that do follow up are (usually) only approved if they are more effective, have fewer side effects, or address patient populations that couldn't take the first generation drugs. Lovastatin was the first statin, but it's not the best. The societal cost due to researching the wrong drugs is hard to quantify, since it's hard to know where the money would have gone if it hadn't been to the "wrong" drug. Absent some new incentive, it probably wouldn't have gone to the "right" drug instead.
So where is my part or at least the public part of the patent from the money people give to cancer research?
The universities that invent cancer treatments license them out to companies that develop them, just like their other inventions. If you want patents to cover basic science and laws of nature (what a lot of cancer research is actually about), the Supreme Court has a bone to pick with you.
Fun fact: Most medical device and pharmaceutical research is actually done by the NIH, on the taxpayer dime, only to be subsequently patented and locked down by greedy-ass, for-profit corporations.
Eh, no. First of all, ever since the Bayh-Dole Act universities have been patenting their research like crazy. They have IP attorneys, technology transfer departments, and big holes in their budgets to fill. If there's money to be made from their research, they are getting it or suing the bejeezus out of someone until they do. Second of all: Universities generally do basic research, the kind that identifies drug targets, not drugs themselves. The majority of the research to invent and develop new drugs is done privately. Yes I know, Marcia Angell, etc. If you actually look at approved drugs about 25% start out in academia vs 75% starting out in industry.
- Why would today's much leaner, meaner, and savvier generic manufacturers (compared to mid 90's India) wait until approval to begin the process of developing their copy? Phase III results come in 2 or 3 years before the FDA signs off. For a drug that looked like a slam dunk a generic manufacturer would have two years of work in by the time the FDA approved the original. They'd turn in their paperwork for their copy to the FDA the same day the FDA approved the original.
I'm also really dubious about the "prize" system that a lot of economists (including these two) tout as being more efficient. Quite often it is the second or third drug in a class that ends up helping the most people, e.g., lipitor vs mevacor. Those "me too" drugs started development at roughly the same time as the first-in-class drug. Will the prize for them be as big?
X years protection to bring a product to market, Y years protection post market would be great, but not easy. The big problem: define available. You invent a product. A "completely independent" company copies it and puts it on the market first. You sue them; a long and tedious process with both sides dragging things out for years. After 5 years you settle and take the bulk of their profits. Then you licence the product to them and again receive the bulk of the profits for another 5 years. Mission "double my patent life" complete. Comparable collusions between generic and original pharma developers complete with ritualized lawsuits have been going on for a few decades, leaving congress to play whack-a-mole with the loopholes.
You should have 5 years of protection at absolute maximum, because every year of protection you get is another year a person with cancer can't afford their medication,
Unfortunately it now takes about 12 years to go from patent to approved drug. Eight years of protection doesn't seem out of line for 12 years of sunk costs.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
You'd be surprised. A medicine may have only a few components, but the patent for an active pharmaceutical ingredient will cover all of the combinatoric possibilities for related analogues and formulations, combinations with other drugs, different possible uses, etc. And then there are the manufacturing patents: Sure, you invented an awesome new biological drug. Now you have to pay licensing fees to the company that has patents that cover the best ways to get wee beasties to express it, and then more fees to the company that has patents on the best ways to purify it, another when you go to package it to the guy who patented not leaving any air or gas in the vial (no joke!).
Also, This was probably a medical device or diagnostic agent, but the figure still seems very low. Two guys, a budget of $1M, and a combined 10 man years of effort might cover the bottled water deliveries for a New Drug Application.
Not to pick on everyone's punching bag but I'm pretty sure the iPad was at least invented by Star Trek and it was called the PADD so many of its patents should not have been granted.
The main problem of the USPTO is it went from a non-profit organization to a for-profit organization so it was in their best interest to allow as many patents as possible as opposed to allowing patents that were truly revolutionary.
I think we can agree that describing a fictional invention doesn't generate the same IP as describing the actual functioning invention.
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation. Once the research is done, private companies can manufacture products. This would have several advantages.
While Pharmas have certainly made plenty of poor drug development decisions, having biologically illiterate congressmen pushing their own agendas wouldn't help. If we let them choose which drug targets and phase 0 - phase II drug candidates to throw billions of dollars at (and it would be those congresscritters pulling the strings no matter what august body they nominally put in charge) we would end up following their whims, resulting in the lost decade of magic beans autism cures followed by the lost decade of Andy "Pharmacology is like computer chips!" Grove wrong turns and the complete end of research into reproductive medicine, because abortion.
I think the NIH should provide more grants and facilities for drug target validation (the stage after discovering biological widget X is related to condition Y, where you try to verify that biological widget X is a druggable target for condition Y). I'm hoping that's where the NIH translational medicine programs end up putting the bulk of their efforts.
Without a good plan, we'll be at it for decades. Here's what I think genomic researchers should do.
Genes (and proteins) are obviously organized hierarchically. Which means there must be a control hierarchy in there somewhere. To unravel and properly classify the genome, researchers must first identify and understand the hierarchical control system. Only then can they begin to populate the branches with the correct genes.
After the tree is completely built and all the genes have found their correct locations on the tree, then it's a matter of going through the tree from the top down and switching the branches of the tree off/on one at a time to see what happens. It's hard but it can be done.
Unfortunately there doesn't have to be "a" control hierarchy: each subsystem can have its own hierarchy (or none) that uses its own unique control mechanisms, they don't have to operate by the same rules, they can mess with each other by lots of different ad hoc means. And that's just the genes: the proteins are much harder to model, at least as far as useful predictions go.
It's been ad hoc with no code review for over 3 billion years.
Slashdot Mirror
Real longevity on an Apple product.
The macbook I'm typing this on is from mid 2006. Seems long enough.
If greedy gloom-n-doom corporations threatening to provide less content if they don't get at least a billion dollars a week in ad revenue make good their threat, that'll just mean more opportunities for indie writers and producers.
Who is going to pay the indie writers and producers (and cameramen, gaffers, runners, editors, graphic artists, special effects artists, caterers, electricians, and grips) if there is no revenue?
What's your favorite online source for news? What would it look like if all of the content that was paid for via ad revenue was removed? And no fair counting someone scraping or blogging their version of a story a reporter was paid to generate as not being paid for by ad revenue.
I realize people make TV shows for free. But they don't make five seasons of "The Wire" for free. They don't make "Game of Thrones" for free. At the other end of the budget scale they don't make "Archer" for free either.
My favorite authors might still be writing books if no one was buying them, but they would be writing them a lot less frequently as a hobby in their spare time while they worked a normal day job.
It can be parallelized, and I'm certain that printers optimized for the different parts would speed things up a bit, but getting the process up to 1 car per week would still require 15-20 printers instead of one. Somehow I see them switching to molded parts wherever practicable if they start production.
It's pretty hard to imagine that fundamentalists could outsmart biologists who, after all, also have access to this tool to make a cure.
It's always easier to break stuff than it is to fix it. There are plenty of viruses and bacteria out there that we can't touch despite years of trying. I don't see much chance of rapidly taking out a novel pathogen except with RNA-interference or antisense treatments, and those have had a checkered history so far.
All in all you would need to have access to a lot of the equipment and skills found in molecular biology and virology labs to get the job done, not just mail order DNA.
Start with the traditional advertising space/personal info revenue model. Calculate the average advertising/personal info revenue per user, offer a privacy-assured ad-free version of the app at that price. Also offer a "free" ad-supported version of the app. Then continually adjust that price to keep the ratio of paying users to "free" users at 1:1.
Notice many of these patents are from the 90s and even 80s or before.
Patent claims expire after 20 years with few exceptions.
if they do have a product give them three years to develop it so most of these troll patents would have expired. I'm talking patents on methods and other broad range patents like gestures and such.
So if you invent something you have to get it into a product on the market within three years or you lose the patent? What if you don't have the rights to the rest of the widget your invention applies to? Also, who defines what is or isn't a broad range patent? It seems like a definition that is made by popularity in the marketplace, probably years and years after the patent was filed.
Also force them to file within 12 months of a competing product being release. That would kill off these massive lawsuits for 5 to 10 years of infringement before they even filed.
What if it takes more than a year for you to find out that your invention is a part of their product? You don't have to disclose all of the IP involved in making a widget to the public to sell the widget.
1. Party A sequences your genome, sends it to you.
2. Party B is a website that supplies free downloadable software that will read the file and score any tests you are interested in. Academic labs have been doing this for some tests for a while now already.
Neither part in isolation is protectable by patent. So long as there's no coordination between the two, once you have your genome sequenced all of your genetic tests (except for ones that require a new sample from a particular tissue, like the ones that are going to become common for cancer diagnostics) will be free for the rest of your life.
Farmer A = Farmer B. Bowman signed the agreements.
The licensing terms were exhausted once the seed was sold to the elevator but patent exhaustion doesn't mean that the patent just goes away. If i buy a used widget that is under patent I can't be held to the terms of the license under which it was sold, but I can be sued if I start making copies of the widget and sell them.
Great, you're free to have those agreements but Bowman didn't sign it. >
Bowman did sign it. Pretty much every soybean farmer in the US signs it.
Spot on (including the mouseover text), but I doubt news organizations would push their apps so hard unless their monetization of mobile visits required the apps Ads in the sidebar are too small when you load the paper with a normal webbrower; if you zoom in to read the article the ads will get pushed off the screen. No clicks, no revenue for the paper. Using the app means the right ads get sent to your platform and stay where you can see them, whether you like it or not. Hopefully they'll figure out that bad solutions to the problem of getting people to view ads just inspire draconian solutions on our end, like flashing ads spread all over the page inspired adblock and flashblock.
They didn't get your password, a service Yahoo set up for developers conveniently allows hackers to get your session cookie. For whatever reason, they haven't patched it.
Fringe is the best show I've ever watched.
Where's Wallace?
2.Marketing increases the profit per dose, but not the price. I won't fight you on drugs being marketed/prescribed inappropriately and the overall cost to society that entails, but if an advertising campaign wasn't bringing in more dollars than it cost they would shut it down. The price is set pretty simply: the highest value for the equation (price) x ( number of doses we can sell to this customer at this price). Justification of the price is an afterthought, and cutting down waste in various layers of the system would certainly make it more efficient, but that would just concentrate the dollars in fewer hands, not lower the price. Prices (in our system) gets lowered by competition.
3. "Me too" drugs and minimal improvements. Most of the time that "me too" drug was already deep into clinical trials by the time the first-in-class was approved. Sometimes it was patented before the first in class was. The drugs that do follow up are (usually) only approved if they are more effective, have fewer side effects, or address patient populations that couldn't take the first generation drugs. Lovastatin was the first statin, but it's not the best. The societal cost due to researching the wrong drugs is hard to quantify, since it's hard to know where the money would have gone if it hadn't been to the "wrong" drug. Absent some new incentive, it probably wouldn't have gone to the "right" drug instead.
So where is my part or at least the public part of the patent from the money people give to cancer research?
The universities that invent cancer treatments license them out to companies that develop them, just like their other inventions. If you want patents to cover basic science and laws of nature (what a lot of cancer research is actually about), the Supreme Court has a bone to pick with you.
Fun fact: Most medical device and pharmaceutical research is actually done by the NIH, on the taxpayer dime, only to be subsequently patented and locked down by greedy-ass, for-profit corporations.
Eh, no. First of all, ever since the Bayh-Dole Act universities have been patenting their research like crazy. They have IP attorneys, technology transfer departments, and big holes in their budgets to fill. If there's money to be made from their research, they are getting it or suing the bejeezus out of someone until they do. Second of all: Universities generally do basic research, the kind that identifies drug targets, not drugs themselves. The majority of the research to invent and develop new drugs is done privately. Yes I know, Marcia Angell, etc. If you actually look at approved drugs about 25% start out in academia vs 75% starting out in industry.
- Why would today's much leaner, meaner, and savvier generic manufacturers (compared to mid 90's India) wait until approval to begin the process of developing their copy? Phase III results come in 2 or 3 years before the FDA signs off. For a drug that looked like a slam dunk a generic manufacturer would have two years of work in by the time the FDA approved the original. They'd turn in their paperwork for their copy to the FDA the same day the FDA approved the original. I'm also really dubious about the "prize" system that a lot of economists (including these two) tout as being more efficient. Quite often it is the second or third drug in a class that ends up helping the most people, e.g., lipitor vs mevacor. Those "me too" drugs started development at roughly the same time as the first-in-class drug. Will the prize for them be as big?
X years protection to bring a product to market, Y years protection post market would be great, but not easy. The big problem: define available. You invent a product. A "completely independent" company copies it and puts it on the market first. You sue them; a long and tedious process with both sides dragging things out for years. After 5 years you settle and take the bulk of their profits. Then you licence the product to them and again receive the bulk of the profits for another 5 years. Mission "double my patent life" complete. Comparable collusions between generic and original pharma developers complete with ritualized lawsuits have been going on for a few decades, leaving congress to play whack-a-mole with the loopholes.
You should have 5 years of protection at absolute maximum, because every year of protection you get is another year a person with cancer can't afford their medication,
Unfortunately it now takes about 12 years to go from patent to approved drug. Eight years of protection doesn't seem out of line for 12 years of sunk costs.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
You'd be surprised. A medicine may have only a few components, but the patent for an active pharmaceutical ingredient will cover all of the combinatoric possibilities for related analogues and formulations, combinations with other drugs, different possible uses, etc. And then there are the manufacturing patents: Sure, you invented an awesome new biological drug. Now you have to pay licensing fees to the company that has patents that cover the best ways to get wee beasties to express it, and then more fees to the company that has patents on the best ways to purify it, another when you go to package it to the guy who patented not leaving any air or gas in the vial (no joke!).
Also, This was probably a medical device or diagnostic agent, but the figure still seems very low. Two guys, a budget of $1M, and a combined 10 man years of effort might cover the bottled water deliveries for a New Drug Application.
Not to pick on everyone's punching bag but I'm pretty sure the iPad was at least invented by Star Trek and it was called the PADD so many of its patents should not have been granted.
The main problem of the USPTO is it went from a non-profit organization to a for-profit organization so it was in their best interest to allow as many patents as possible as opposed to allowing patents that were truly revolutionary.
I think we can agree that describing a fictional invention doesn't generate the same IP as describing the actual functioning invention.
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation. Once the research is done, private companies can manufacture products. This would have several advantages.
While Pharmas have certainly made plenty of poor drug development decisions, having biologically illiterate congressmen pushing their own agendas wouldn't help. If we let them choose which drug targets and phase 0 - phase II drug candidates to throw billions of dollars at (and it would be those congresscritters pulling the strings no matter what august body they nominally put in charge) we would end up following their whims, resulting in the lost decade of magic beans autism cures followed by the lost decade of Andy "Pharmacology is like computer chips!" Grove wrong turns and the complete end of research into reproductive medicine, because abortion.
I think the NIH should provide more grants and facilities for drug target validation (the stage after discovering biological widget X is related to condition Y, where you try to verify that biological widget X is a druggable target for condition Y). I'm hoping that's where the NIH translational medicine programs end up putting the bulk of their efforts.
Without a good plan, we'll be at it for decades. Here's what I think genomic researchers should do.
Genes (and proteins) are obviously organized hierarchically. Which means there must be a control hierarchy in there somewhere. To unravel and properly classify the genome, researchers must first identify and understand the hierarchical control system. Only then can they begin to populate the branches with the correct genes.
After the tree is completely built and all the genes have found their correct locations on the tree, then it's a matter of going through the tree from the top down and switching the branches of the tree off/on one at a time to see what happens. It's hard but it can be done.
Unfortunately there doesn't have to be "a" control hierarchy: each subsystem can have its own hierarchy (or none) that uses its own unique control mechanisms, they don't have to operate by the same rules, they can mess with each other by lots of different ad hoc means. And that's just the genes: the proteins are much harder to model, at least as far as useful predictions go.
It's been ad hoc with no code review for over 3 billion years.