I barely ever feel compelled to respond to "citations please" when the phrase is used as a nonsensical counterargument. Citations don't exist to prove anything. In fact, they don't prove anything. They only serve to further one's knowledge on a topic. I am fully convinced that is not your intent. And I would feel not only unjustified, but actually unethical in giving in to the bully demands of an AC trying to derail the conversation. Citations only give credence to a point by showing that some authoritative source agrees with it. AC responds by not revealing even the source of his own comments (his name). In other words, all your "oh how convenient" arguments are bs when you post as AC.
The right to deny use is not something anyone is rightfully entitled to. It's a government established privilege that the public grants under the pretext that it should provide for a social benefit.
Once again, it's not given freely under arbitrary assumptions. It's given in exchange for revealing the trade secrets to the FDA. It's an exchange -- it's a not an arbitrary give away. Without it, the industry would be wiped out and that would unquestionably make us all suffer. US drug industry is the modern day mirracle. Very few of the drugs come from the universities which get the overwhelming portion of the NIH money.
No, the government doesn't owe me a million dollars any more than it owes you a monopoly privilege on something.
Your argument would have some weight if the drug companies didn't have to reveal their trade secretes to the FDA before being allowed to engage in business. As it is, it hold no water.
So it's not stealing because it's not something you were ever rightfully entitled to.
Anything you get in an exchange with the government is something your are entitled to if both sides made good-faith efforts in the trade. And for the millionth time, since the FDA insists that you have reveal your process before you can sell the product, you have to have a right to be the only one selling it. That is enforced through IP. Otherwise, FDA has nothing to offer the drug companies. And no company would go through the expense of R&D and clinical trials (and those are incredibly expensive -- to the tune of $100million+ for each drug) if it meant that a competitor could copy them the next day and undersell them because the competitor would not have to recoup the expenses. Just so we clear, you are not only anti-human slave-system-wishing Neanderthal. You are attacking humanity's ability to sustain itself. You disgust me.
No one is entitled to a government established monopoly.
Oh? They have to file their process with the FDA in order to be allowed to sell their product. If the government has the right to demand that they reveal their trade secrets, then it has to compensate them with the right not to have those trade secrets be used by their competitors. And since the government does feel there is compelling public need for those trade secrets to be revealed, it must therefore, by extension, be true that there is a compelling public need for their temporary monopoly to be enforced.
I am not confused. At ALL. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny little bit. But you do lie well. I've already explained what specifically infringement steals: ownership. It doesn't steal use (which is worth little in case of IP), but it steals ownership (which is worth a lot in the case of IP). You are trying to compare it to stealing something with non-nominal replication cost (a car), but in case of a car the right to use is worth almost as much as the entire right to own (because of large replication cost). So your comparison is loaded from the start. The key difference remains. The right to use is not the same as the right to own.
NIH budget is less than 5% of the pharmaceutical market.
Not true. The government spends more than that, as the link I provided (and as many other existing citations) show. You make up your numbers, you provide no citations whatsoever, you just make up numbers convenient to you.
Ok, I just looked it up again. They did increase the budget significantly under Obama. It went up to ~$30 billion a year. But it was around $6-$7 billion during the 2000's. The pharma market place is around 300-350 billion. So yes, it does exceed 5% at the moment, but it's still under 10% and it's only been that way for a few years. For the previous 8-10 years, it was 5% or less of the size of the pharma industry. And since we are talking about effects of money on research, it is that long term 5% contribution number that is more significant that the latest 10% development.
R&D costs still get reported as R&D costs under the old company name and are still considered part of the overall R&D cost claims that pharma spends
The old company does not have to file public reports. They are usually private (financed with private capital). All these statistics of R&D vs marketing come out of the filing of the public companies. Private companies' finances are private. And often times this private capital comes in the form of investment from established pharma companies. In this case it shows up as long-term illiquid investment on their balance sheet (again, not as R&D). And again, the private companies which are thus formed do not file public financial reports so their 100% investment in R&D does not show up in any of these figures.
The difference here is that infringing on someone's monopoly privilege doesn't deny them the use of that which is being infringed on.
But the right to use is not ownership. Ownership has to have the right to deny use to others. When the replication cost is nominal the right to use is worthless essentially. The only component of ownership which has any value, in that case, is the right to deny use.
The government spends a good percentage on R&D, way more than five percent. But go ahead, keep making things up out of nowhere and telling lies without providing any citations.
You lie again!!!! J'accuse!!! NIH budget is less than 5% of the pharmaceutical market. And most of the research funds do not show up as R&D. They show up as acquisition. So you are a liar twice over. Most of R&D is paid for not through direct support of R&D departments but through buy outs of start up pharma companies which go through clinical trials and such. Such start ups do NOTHING but R&D. So when they are bought out after approval, this M&A money is a direct injection of funds into R&D -- it just doesn't show up as such in accounting. Which bring me to a third point: this
Pharmaceutical corporations are very well known for exaggerating their R&D costs.
makes you three times a liar! They severely understate their R&D costs by hiding most of their R&D costs in M&A.
The fundamental property of ownership, as such, is the right to deny use. If you own a car, you have a right to deny its use to others. If you lend the car to your friend, your friend can use it, but doesn't own it. Why? Because if he lends the car to someone else, you have a a right to revoke that lending (as the owner of the car). Taking away from owners their right to deny use is theft because it takes away the ownership. So no, technically, I am not conflating theft with infringement. Your argument that only compulsion of physical act is slavery is equally specious. You are essentially advocating enslaving all the workers of the mind.
The fact that a government does it, doesn't make it legal. Every violation of WTO rules is a government action. Blatantly ignoring IP of law abiding entities is no less theft than downloading the latest Bieber song. Some would argue that it is less of a theft than stealing something which has a non-nominal replication cost. But as long as we are comparing apples to apples, taking away someone IP rights because you really, really, really, really need what they created (or what what acquired by paying those who created it) is all the same.
How much did they spend on acquisition? Most research today is done by pharma upstarts which do research at a loss and then get bought out once they have a product. This fuels further research because the most of the money that is transferred in the buy outs go on to start new research companies.
Most R&D medicine is taken by volunteers who don't get paid for being part of the clinical trials.
But the doctors conducting the trials are not volunteers. Not are the companies producing medical and chemical equipment they use. Nor are the labs doing their tests. Nor are the lawyers filling paperwork by the pound that is related to regulatory approval.
Most of the scientists and others conducting the clinical trials don't get paid
Outrageous lie.
The government pays for a ton of R&D and contributes a lot to R&D.
Roughly 5% (6-7billion out of the 300-400 billion market), but ok, "tons".
Pharmaceutical corporations don't get independently audited to ensure that their government established monopoly prices are justified.
They are justified by the virtue of the fact that they ask for them. In exactly the same way that the gas stations are justified in charging the price for gas that they see fit. If you don't like, don't buy it. The world does not owe you a cookie. And if demand that government makes the cookie maker work for the price other than the one they name, then you, sir, are advocating slavery. And you have 0 moral standing to judge others.
Advertising actually save money because it encourages more sales.
That's an often repeated lie, but you can be forgiven because of how often it is repeated. If the drug is that essential marketing it is very cheap. But even if it weren't, the main cost of producing a new drug is the research and legal fees involved in regulatory approval and related trials.
Academic research is funded by drug companies and other corporations.
The money that comes out of that pot still comes into that pot from the drug company profits.
They don't make that much profit. I don't see Bayer in the top 100.
Their business strategy is theirs to develop. If they had a long-term strategy for recouping the costs of research, then it may appear not to be profitable initially.
Doubtful. No company sells at a loss. Bayer would just avoid India completely,
Which part of compulsory licensing don't you understand? They now have to provide licensing at a loss in order to stay in India at all.
Last century saw genetic selection (aka eugenics) as a way to "improve humanity" after the world was shocked with the new scientific discovery of evolution. I guess this time around the ass holes who think the government's job is to shape society rather than serve society are putting hopes in the new wave of scientific advances to achieve their goals.
But this isn't government spending less. This is government employing highly-paid bureaucrats (and they are highly paid at this point) to figure out how to pay less for highly skilled private sector work. They are not replacing people with lesser skill by people with higher skills (that would be efficient). They are offering peanuts for mundane work (ie, nothing innovate there) which requires professional experience. It's one thing for the government to sponsor basic research (because business won't invest in that which won't be profitable for another 50 years). It's quite another to try to create illusion of attempting efficiency while maintaining and increasing the earnings of all those entrenched in the apparatus. They are doing the latter here. Instead of hiring someone to think of ways to get free tech work, why not fire those who can't do tech work and hire those who can do tech work and can think of ways to use tech to make government more efficient? In other words, replace some dead wood with someone who can code this problem up.
If one developer can do the job that 5 bureaucrats cannot, then why not fire 5 bureaucrats and give their salary to 1 developer? Or is it written somewhere that bureaucrats must remain employed while developers must continue working for peanuts?
Since anonymous is, at least according to the common understanding, anonymous, it may have US members. If US citizens collaborate with anyone in targeting US intelligence community, they would be guilty of bona fide treason.
This opens the room for targeting Wikileaks in the way that the Manning leak did not. The Manning leak made Bradley Manning a traitor but allowed Wikileaks to remain journalists. If Wikileaks participates in targeting of the US intelligence, then they won't be receiving information after the fact.
They'll be assisting US citizens in committing treason. This makes them possibly chargeable as collaborators with traitors and possibly simply targetable as enemies of the US. Retaliating against attacks on military installations is generally considered a legitimate use of military forces. At that point Assange can be simply abducted out of any location in the world or even killed on the spot without violation of any US laws.
I do hope Wikileaks doesn't do anything this dumb. It would undermine the status of all journalists as illegitimate targets for the US armed forces. This line between targeted-for-publishing-leaks and targeted-for-attacking-armed-forces would cease to exist in 1 person and it would be of questionable legality after that.
Is that what you believe yourself to be? Someone who cares about facts and reasoning? The reason I ask is that you are arguing exclusively in defense of your preconceived notions.
Wow, you cannot believe in any sort of collective action whatsoever?
Did you get that from my saying "excuses are generally actions taken by single-minded entities (not necessarily individuals, but at least entities which have the ability to act or speak with a single-minded purpose)?" Because that would be quite an act of cognitive dissonance.
There are actions taken by collections of people when those people can be persuaded to act in a centrally-managed manner. But "society" is a much broader abstraction. "Society" do not just refer to people persuaded to act in a centrally-directed manner. It also refers to groups which simply share common properties. When one speaks of "scientific community", that's a society of somewhat like-minded and like-oriented individuals. But it's certainly not hierarchically structured as you would suggest. I think you might be viewing the society at large as some sort of structure with exact ranks and ladders of power. When, in fact, it's not. Large groups of people coalesce for the purposes of common goals, but they aren't born into roles within that structure, nor do they remain there for significant portions of their lives (not in general).
Take your meds!
Interesting that you would reach for that exclamation. Is that how problems are solved in your world? Medicate those who disagree with you or whom you do not understand?
But I digress, I guess. So this God and King (or is it one and the same?) that you imagine ruling our world and personifying us as a people... is that who you believe is making excuses? Is that the monster who you believe should behave more humanely and in line with your idea of how the world should be ran?
Just out of curiosity, do others get a say in what is the right way for "society" to behave? Or is it just you?
But leaders are individuals. They are not "society". Oh, and I don't saving. I wasn't trying to save myself. I was pondering why you were trying to assign to an abstraction an attribute which it cannot have. It doesn't make much sense.
I was going to mention that I don't listen to radio, but then I realized that I've heard this "talk radio" accusation on many other occasions. When you accuse me of "aping" opinions of others, are you really just confessing your sins?
So, when's the last time you got out of the lab?:-p
I don't think he's ever been in a lab. If he did spend any significant amount of time in the lab, he'd have a better sense in distinguishing between the cases when citation is needed and when it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
a starship troopers joke in this somewhere, but i am too lazy to think of it.
You are an idiot. I would link to all of your comments as citations to prove this fact. But unfortunately, I can't tell one AC from another.
I'm still waiting for your citations.
I barely ever feel compelled to respond to "citations please" when the phrase is used as a nonsensical counterargument. Citations don't exist to prove anything. In fact, they don't prove anything. They only serve to further one's knowledge on a topic. I am fully convinced that is not your intent. And I would feel not only unjustified, but actually unethical in giving in to the bully demands of an AC trying to derail the conversation. Citations only give credence to a point by showing that some authoritative source agrees with it. AC responds by not revealing even the source of his own comments (his name). In other words, all your "oh how convenient" arguments are bs when you post as AC.
The right to deny use is not something anyone is rightfully entitled to. It's a government established privilege that the public grants under the pretext that it should provide for a social benefit.
Once again, it's not given freely under arbitrary assumptions. It's given in exchange for revealing the trade secrets to the FDA. It's an exchange -- it's a not an arbitrary give away. Without it, the industry would be wiped out and that would unquestionably make us all suffer. US drug industry is the modern day mirracle. Very few of the drugs come from the universities which get the overwhelming portion of the NIH money.
No, the government doesn't owe me a million dollars any more than it owes you a monopoly privilege on something.
Your argument would have some weight if the drug companies didn't have to reveal their trade secretes to the FDA before being allowed to engage in business. As it is, it hold no water.
So it's not stealing because it's not something you were ever rightfully entitled to.
Anything you get in an exchange with the government is something your are entitled to if both sides made good-faith efforts in the trade. And for the millionth time, since the FDA insists that you have reveal your process before you can sell the product, you have to have a right to be the only one selling it. That is enforced through IP. Otherwise, FDA has nothing to offer the drug companies. And no company would go through the expense of R&D and clinical trials (and those are incredibly expensive -- to the tune of $100million+ for each drug) if it meant that a competitor could copy them the next day and undersell them because the competitor would not have to recoup the expenses. Just so we clear, you are not only anti-human slave-system-wishing Neanderthal. You are attacking humanity's ability to sustain itself. You disgust me.
No one is entitled to a government established monopoly.
Oh? They have to file their process with the FDA in order to be allowed to sell their product. If the government has the right to demand that they reveal their trade secrets, then it has to compensate them with the right not to have those trade secrets be used by their competitors. And since the government does feel there is compelling public need for those trade secrets to be revealed, it must therefore, by extension, be true that there is a compelling public need for their temporary monopoly to be enforced.
Infringement is not. But keep confusing the two.
I am not confused. At ALL. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny little bit. But you do lie well. I've already explained what specifically infringement steals: ownership. It doesn't steal use (which is worth little in case of IP), but it steals ownership (which is worth a lot in the case of IP). You are trying to compare it to stealing something with non-nominal replication cost (a car), but in case of a car the right to use is worth almost as much as the entire right to own (because of large replication cost). So your comparison is loaded from the start. The key difference remains. The right to use is not the same as the right to own.
NIH budget is less than 5% of the pharmaceutical market.
Not true. The government spends more than that, as the link I provided (and as many other existing citations) show. You make up your numbers, you provide no citations whatsoever, you just make up numbers convenient to you.
Ok, I just looked it up again. They did increase the budget significantly under Obama. It went up to ~$30 billion a year. But it was around $6-$7 billion during the 2000's. The pharma market place is around 300-350 billion. So yes, it does exceed 5% at the moment, but it's still under 10% and it's only been that way for a few years. For the previous 8-10 years, it was 5% or less of the size of the pharma industry. And since we are talking about effects of money on research, it is that long term 5% contribution number that is more significant that the latest 10% development.
R&D costs still get reported as R&D costs under the old company name and are still considered part of the overall R&D cost claims that pharma spends
The old company does not have to file public reports. They are usually private (financed with private capital). All these statistics of R&D vs marketing come out of the filing of the public companies. Private companies' finances are private. And often times this private capital comes in the form of investment from established pharma companies. In this case it shows up as long-term illiquid investment on their balance sheet (again, not as R&D). And again, the private companies which are thus formed do not file public financial reports so their 100% investment in R&D does not show up in any of these figures.
The difference here is that infringing on someone's monopoly privilege doesn't deny them the use of that which is being infringed on.
But the right to use is not ownership. Ownership has to have the right to deny use to others. When the replication cost is nominal the right to use is worthless essentially. The only component of ownership which has any value, in that case, is the right to deny use.
The government spends a good percentage on R&D, way more than five percent. But go ahead, keep making things up out of nowhere and telling lies without providing any citations.
You lie again!!!! J'accuse!!! NIH budget is less than 5% of the pharmaceutical market. And most of the research funds do not show up as R&D. They show up as acquisition. So you are a liar twice over. Most of R&D is paid for not through direct support of R&D departments but through buy outs of start up pharma companies which go through clinical trials and such. Such start ups do NOTHING but R&D. So when they are bought out after approval, this M&A money is a direct injection of funds into R&D -- it just doesn't show up as such in accounting. Which bring me to a third point: this
Pharmaceutical corporations are very well known for exaggerating their R&D costs.
makes you three times a liar! They severely understate their R&D costs by hiding most of their R&D costs in M&A.
The fundamental property of ownership, as such, is the right to deny use. If you own a car, you have a right to deny its use to others. If you lend the car to your friend, your friend can use it, but doesn't own it. Why? Because if he lends the car to someone else, you have a a right to revoke that lending (as the owner of the car). Taking away from owners their right to deny use is theft because it takes away the ownership. So no, technically, I am not conflating theft with infringement. Your argument that only compulsion of physical act is slavery is equally specious. You are essentially advocating enslaving all the workers of the mind.
The fact that a government does it, doesn't make it legal. Every violation of WTO rules is a government action. Blatantly ignoring IP of law abiding entities is no less theft than downloading the latest Bieber song. Some would argue that it is less of a theft than stealing something which has a non-nominal replication cost. But as long as we are comparing apples to apples, taking away someone IP rights because you really, really, really, really need what they created (or what what acquired by paying those who created it) is all the same.
Now that India is involved in blatant IP theft, let's hope that high tariffs are imposed on all IT outsourcing to India.
How much did they spend on acquisition? Most research today is done by pharma upstarts which do research at a loss and then get bought out once they have a product. This fuels further research because the most of the money that is transferred in the buy outs go on to start new research companies.
Most R&D medicine is taken by volunteers who don't get paid for being part of the clinical trials.
But the doctors conducting the trials are not volunteers. Not are the companies producing medical and chemical equipment they use. Nor are the labs doing their tests. Nor are the lawyers filling paperwork by the pound that is related to regulatory approval.
Most of the scientists and others conducting the clinical trials don't get paid
Outrageous lie.
The government pays for a ton of R&D and contributes a lot to R&D.
Roughly 5% (6-7billion out of the 300-400 billion market), but ok, "tons".
Pharmaceutical corporations don't get independently audited to ensure that their government established monopoly prices are justified.
They are justified by the virtue of the fact that they ask for them. In exactly the same way that the gas stations are justified in charging the price for gas that they see fit. If you don't like, don't buy it. The world does not owe you a cookie. And if demand that government makes the cookie maker work for the price other than the one they name, then you, sir, are advocating slavery. And you have 0 moral standing to judge others.
I think you take doctors to be researchers constantly going through myriad of pharmacological data coming out every year. It's not so. Not even close.
Advertising actually save money because it encourages more sales.
That's an often repeated lie, but you can be forgiven because of how often it is repeated. If the drug is that essential marketing it is very cheap. But even if it weren't, the main cost of producing a new drug is the research and legal fees involved in regulatory approval and related trials.
Academic research is funded by drug companies and other corporations.
The money that comes out of that pot still comes into that pot from the drug company profits.
They don't make that much profit. I don't see Bayer in the top 100.
Their business strategy is theirs to develop. If they had a long-term strategy for recouping the costs of research, then it may appear not to be profitable initially.
Doubtful. No company sells at a loss. Bayer would just avoid India completely,
Which part of compulsory licensing don't you understand? They now have to provide licensing at a loss in order to stay in India at all.
Last century saw genetic selection (aka eugenics) as a way to "improve humanity" after the world was shocked with the new scientific discovery of evolution. I guess this time around the ass holes who think the government's job is to shape society rather than serve society are putting hopes in the new wave of scientific advances to achieve their goals.
But this isn't government spending less. This is government employing highly-paid bureaucrats (and they are highly paid at this point) to figure out how to pay less for highly skilled private sector work. They are not replacing people with lesser skill by people with higher skills (that would be efficient). They are offering peanuts for mundane work (ie, nothing innovate there) which requires professional experience. It's one thing for the government to sponsor basic research (because business won't invest in that which won't be profitable for another 50 years). It's quite another to try to create illusion of attempting efficiency while maintaining and increasing the earnings of all those entrenched in the apparatus. They are doing the latter here. Instead of hiring someone to think of ways to get free tech work, why not fire those who can't do tech work and hire those who can do tech work and can think of ways to use tech to make government more efficient? In other words, replace some dead wood with someone who can code this problem up.
If one developer can do the job that 5 bureaucrats cannot, then why not fire 5 bureaucrats and give their salary to 1 developer? Or is it written somewhere that bureaucrats must remain employed while developers must continue working for peanuts?
The Irish just had to turn a farce into a tragedy.
Since anonymous is, at least according to the common understanding, anonymous, it may have US members. If US citizens collaborate with anyone in targeting US intelligence community, they would be guilty of bona fide treason.
This opens the room for targeting Wikileaks in the way that the Manning leak did not. The Manning leak made Bradley Manning a traitor but allowed Wikileaks to remain journalists. If Wikileaks participates in targeting of the US intelligence, then they won't be receiving information after the fact.
They'll be assisting US citizens in committing treason. This makes them possibly chargeable as collaborators with traitors and possibly simply targetable as enemies of the US. Retaliating against attacks on military installations is generally considered a legitimate use of military forces. At that point Assange can be simply abducted out of any location in the world or even killed on the spot without violation of any US laws.
I do hope Wikileaks doesn't do anything this dumb. It would undermine the status of all journalists as illegitimate targets for the US armed forces. This line between targeted-for-publishing-leaks and targeted-for-attacking-armed-forces would cease to exist in 1 person and it would be of questionable legality after that.
Is that what you believe yourself to be? Someone who cares about facts and reasoning? The reason I ask is that you are arguing exclusively in defense of your preconceived notions.
Prove me wrong!
In my judgement, you don't consider that as a possibility. So that would be a fool's errand on my part.
Wow, you cannot believe in any sort of collective action whatsoever?
Did you get that from my saying "excuses are generally actions taken by single-minded entities (not necessarily individuals, but at least entities which have the ability to act or speak with a single-minded purpose)?" Because that would be quite an act of cognitive dissonance.
There are actions taken by collections of people when those people can be persuaded to act in a centrally-managed manner. But "society" is a much broader abstraction. "Society" do not just refer to people persuaded to act in a centrally-directed manner. It also refers to groups which simply share common properties. When one speaks of "scientific community", that's a society of somewhat like-minded and like-oriented individuals. But it's certainly not hierarchically structured as you would suggest. I think you might be viewing the society at large as some sort of structure with exact ranks and ladders of power. When, in fact, it's not. Large groups of people coalesce for the purposes of common goals, but they aren't born into roles within that structure, nor do they remain there for significant portions of their lives (not in general).
Take your meds!
Interesting that you would reach for that exclamation. Is that how problems are solved in your world? Medicate those who disagree with you or whom you do not understand?
But I digress, I guess. So this God and King (or is it one and the same?) that you imagine ruling our world and personifying us as a people... is that who you believe is making excuses? Is that the monster who you believe should behave more humanely and in line with your idea of how the world should be ran?
Just out of curiosity, do others get a say in what is the right way for "society" to behave? Or is it just you?
But leaders are individuals. They are not "society". Oh, and I don't saving. I wasn't trying to save myself. I was pondering why you were trying to assign to an abstraction an attribute which it cannot have. It doesn't make much sense.
I was going to mention that I don't listen to radio, but then I realized that I've heard this "talk radio" accusation on many other occasions. When you accuse me of "aping" opinions of others, are you really just confessing your sins?
So, when's the last time you got out of the lab? :-p
I don't think he's ever been in a lab. If he did spend any significant amount of time in the lab, he'd have a better sense in distinguishing between the cases when citation is needed and when it isn't.