That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,
we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours;
and this we should do freely and generously.
- Benjamin Franklin
Not trolling. I work in biotech. This industry lives and dies on IP. It literally costs hundreds of millions of dollars to run clinical trials and most of them fail. If someone else can come along and make a knock-off of your product and steal your profit then there's no incentive to run them. The whole model of the pharmaceutical industry relies on ~15-20 years of patent protection. People certainly play games with patents in biopharma, too, but without some form of IP protection you wouldn't get new drugs. Simple as that.
Very true. Or even just: "A combination of chemicals".
What I also find remarkable is how much actual research in biotech is done with public money.
And how much big pharma spends on marketing, as opposed to actual research.
I think India's take on pharma products is enlightening. The pharma industry has managed to effect some self-serving changes in India's patent laws. However, as we speak the Supreme Court of India is hearing a case of particular interest.
"A combination of chemicals inside of a pill that cures headaches"
Oh my god. That is a terrific analogy. I regularly talk to people who don't understand the horror of software patents and have been trying to come up with a good example - this is perfect.
It's unfortunate that we call the protection for pharmaceutical products "patents." They are probably more like a copyright on a compound with a 20-year expiration. Yes, this is totally necessary, also as is preventing someone from knocking out a direct copy of some innovative physical machine.
Conventional wisdom for a long time considered software more like a book (or else the "author" of the first spreadsheet would probably be a billionaire many times over).
When the legal industry saw the money involved in software during the dot-com boom they muscled their way in, as any racketeers would do. Their racket is of course protection and counter-protection services riding on the conveniently-broken USPTO.
No, they're entirely functional. You can't copyright, say, penicillin (it is not a creative work!), but you can get a patent on the use of penicillin to kill microorganisms.
Yeah that's true, the specific application is involved so its not strictly equivalent to a copyright. All in all, I think the pharmaceutical industry is a place where patents themselves seem to work as intended even if manufacturers' legal, sales and marketing departments have been known to take atrocious liberties.
Pharmaceuticals are an area where patents seem most justified. Companies need to spend years of R&D to find a specific compound that helps cure disease, and then need to recoup the costs over years. I definitely feel software patents hinder innovation more than help it, but I would be worried about less investment put into drug discovery if the patent system were completely abolished.
