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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 13:55   #1
All Systems Go
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Hypothetical Question

the UK nationalises the pharmecutical companies and gets their patents. Where's the problem?
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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 15:33   #2
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Re: Hypothetical Question

No cure for AIDS, ever.
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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 15:43   #3
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nodrog
No cure for AIDS, ever.
Quoted for when you realise this was a stupid comment and delete it.
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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 15:46   #4
Nodrog
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Quoted for when you realise this was a stupid comment and delete it.
It was flippant but it captures the essence of the point - a scrapping of patents and/or nationalisation is going to lead to significantly less innovation in the medium/long term. It may even have knock-on effects on other industries outside of pharmaceuticals - if the government of a country has a history of not respecting patents then that country becomes an undesirable place to base a company thats trades in intellectual property.

Of course, this is all just utilitariainism and doesnt go to the heart of the matter - the real reason why the government shouldnt nationalise pharmaceuticals (or anything) is because its theft of other people's work.
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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 18:09   #5
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Actually i was going to make a thread about it but this seems to be as good a place as any. Im having a bit of a crisis of er philosophy. You see i now accept that global intellectual development occurs better if the ideas of individuals aren't protected. That may seem an obvious thing to say but its fairly profound to me.

The internet has allowed part timers and amateurs to develop products that are as good if not better than ones produced by corporations. The bureaucracy that is inherent in capitalist intellectual proprietry makes it far less effecient at developing new ideas. As a basic example checking through patents is an enrormous task that is both time consuming and expensive. A system where no such restrictions exist makes it far easier to do something without having to worry about litigation. People who write free software aren't really worrying about patent restriction only the idea.

If the government brought intellectual development into the public sphere but excersised no control over it or allowed anyone to do likewise, a cure for AIDS could be found far quicker.
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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 20:27   #6
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Re: Hypothetical Question

When one of these amateurs produces a new drug requring millions of pounds of equipment to synthesise and test, then maybe we can treat them as a credible alternative. Theres a pretty big difference in scale between writing some open-source text editor and carrying out expensive drug developments and tests over a period of years. Using computer software as a model for a patent system is flawed because the cost of R&D involved in programming applications is comparatively low.

Anyway, for all the hype about open source software, the vast majority of people would rather use Windows, Photoshop and Word than Linux, Gimp and OpenOffice.

Also, I dont really see the implication from "some people dont want to patent their stuff" to "noone should be able to patent their stuff". Its like claiming that "some people are willing to work for free" implies "noone should ever get paid". The current system allows people to make their stuff available with no restrictions if that is what they choose to do.

Quote:

If the government brought intellectual development into the public sphere but excersised no control over it or allowed anyone to do likewise, a cure for AIDS could be found far quicker.
I think that most people with self-respect would refuse to work in a field where they knew their ideas were going to be expropriated by others as soon as they became public. Someone might be perfectly happy working for free as long as its a choice, but if youre forcing them to work for free then you may find them less willing. Your system seems to be based around taking advantage of people's good nature and I find it pretty distasteful.

Last edited by Nodrog; 24 Feb 2007 at 20:49.
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Unread 24 Feb 2007, 21:23   #7
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nodrog
When one of these amateurs produces a new drug requring millions of pounds of equipment to synthesise and test, then maybe we can treat them as a credible alternative. Theres a pretty big difference in scale between writing some open-source text editor and carrying out expensive drug developments and tests over a period of years. Using computer software as a model for a patent system is flawed because the cost of R&D involved in programming applications is comparatively low.
One of the problems in trying to use examples to compare different industries is people focus on the examples not the idea. But R&D cost for software isn't comparatively low, its comparatively equal, Vista development was not cheap, it cost microsoft in the order of $6 billion. I'm sure before the WWW made the internet popular people were saying it was unfeasible for freely developed software to equal commercial products. Id say one of the reasons the illicit drug industry (ie bad illegal drugs) continues to prosper and doesn't stay fixated around one particular drug is because of its anarchist nature. You seem to be missing the point that the patents on testing would also go - people would develop better/cheaper/collaorative ways to test the drugs.

Quote:
Anyway, for all the hype about open source software, the vast majority of people would rather use Windows, Photoshop and Word than Linux, Gimp and OpenOffice.
They're phased into a particular form of thinking , besides i genuinely think this is changing and most software will be freely developed in the future.

Quote:
Also, I dont really see the implication from "some people dont want to patent their stuff" to "noone should be able to patent their stuff". Its like claiming that "some people are willing to work for free" implies "noone should ever get paid". The current system allows people to make their stuff available with no restrictions if that is what they choose to do.
Then all things being equal you'd want scientific theories to be patentable? The implications of relativity for example carry on into GPS satellites. The foundation of corporate discovery as it is today rests on the inability of people to protect revolutionary ideas.


Quote:
I think that most people with self-respect would refuse to work in a field where they knew their ideas were going to be expropriated by others as soon as they became public. Someone might be perfectly happy working for free as long as its a choice, but if youre forcing them to work for free then you may find them less willing. Your system seems to be based around taking advantage of people's good nature and I find it pretty distasteful.

Good luck protecting your maths ideas
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Unread 25 Feb 2007, 23:43   #8
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Pharmaceutical companies are rarely national to the UK. Most are global companies.
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Unread 26 Feb 2007, 05:48   #9
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Re: Hypothetical Question

I think a fair bit about intellectual property, whenever I'm not thinking about amusing ways to kill tk actually. I have to say I disagree with nodrog, there is nothing intrinsic to a nationalised industry that makes it less efficient, just that generally they become much more plodding entities due to the stupid way they're run. However if you can alter that you can make them much better. There's no question some shit things would happen with the abolition of intellectual property, and if it happens to cause the cancellation of Heroes I might re-evaluate my whole perspective on the thing but then again the abolition of slavery probably had some bad short-term economic consequences . Not that I'm comparing the two, just stating that pragmatic justifications are secondary to moral ones (unless you're a pragmatist I guess).

The problem is that I don't believe being the originator of an idea gives you any sort of realistic claim to ownership of it due to the fact ideas are merely thought processes. Largely my reasoning would stem from the fact that the first guy who invented the wheel shouldn't be allowed to copyright it for eternity. That is unfair on others who may think of the idea later. Of course this then becomes more tenuous the further down the line you go. The odds on two people at different times independently coming up with the plot for the four billionth episode of CSI: Random City are, well, pretty good actually from its appalling repetitive nature but you sort of get my point. This is reflected pretty well in something like the pharmaceutical industry, you probably have two companies working in pretty similar areas, if one invents a cure twenty minutes before the other discovers the exact same cure and patents it in time do they really have a superior moral claim to ownership of the idea ahead of the other? What if they invent it first but patent it second? I don't really think there's a sound intellectual defence of this.

That said I have little doubt that the only reason which necessitates, in any way, this sort of system is that people are complete assholes a lot of the time. Maybe it's an evolutionary imperative or some other pseudo-darwinian drivel. As a friend of mine says people don't have to share but sharing is actually pretty awesome. And despite pithy comebacks and snide one-liners about sharing your bed with an obese homeless person this remains largely true. The fact that because of previous "evil" actions we are left without a wholly moral response to certain situations isn't really surprising. You just try and deal with it in the best way possible and move on.


Hmm, that was a bit of a ramble. Oh well, at least I'm not insane, right Frank?
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Unread 26 Feb 2007, 12:15   #10
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Re: Hypothetical Question

If people were more interested in the advancement of their area of interest instead of frantically guarding their thought processes from others we'd all be better off. The only decent argument I can see of IP is making money to live off. But if you have an idea you should then go about marketing and producing the goods that come from that idea. If you don't oh dear. Bad luck.
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Unread 26 Feb 2007, 12:50   #11
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Just to be pedantic, this is a real question about a hypothetical situation....
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Unread 26 Feb 2007, 13:35   #12
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Also, the argument that you need IP so that people will be motivated to research into a particular area is flawed. It assumes people are only motivated by money, which, in research, is quite false.

In relation to the last point, you don't even need hordes of money to build an organisation capable of excellent R&D. The open source community has proved this false. It has also bought light to the fact you don't have to organise people in a bureaucratically inefficient manner to 1) produce some of the best products (think apache) and 2) make money (think Red Hat).

If the creators of the internet, html and the c programming language had kept their inventions locked up with IP the computing industry would be pretty shitty right now.

Admittedly, you often require money to facilitate R&D (think DARPA's funding and in the free market IBM and Novell's funding of open source projects) but that need is not synonymous to the need of IP rights; companies still make enough money.

In addition, the computer sector brings to light a danger of IP. The major commercial companies engage in IP right sharing. This perpetuates a cartel of major companies and exclusion of minor, often very creative, companies.

Who created DirectX? The in-house microsoft development team? Nope.

Shall we just quote Issac Newton and get this thread over with?
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Unread 26 Feb 2007, 14:01   #13
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Re: Hypothetical Question

Efficiency can be measured in a number of ways. Saying one thing is more efficient than another is actually pretty meaningless unless you're defining what you're talking about exactly. I sort of discuss an issue tangentally related to this here here in relation to mapping data in the public domain.

There's a lot that can be said here, and my original post on this subject was going to be more than 3000 words. I've tried to cut it down, but it's still too long. All of this is a gross oversimplification I realise, but I tried to avoid saying "Of course, in reality...." after every statement.

1. The disadvantage of multiple (private) projects to tackle a problem is that a great amount of effort is spent repeating work that's already been done. (In real terms, it's not quite like this - scientific journals etc means there's a lot of public science contributing to these projects even indirectly). But in a worst case scenario, a cure for AIDS (which we'll say = CostX) is going to CostY = CostX * (Number of Competing Private Projects To Cure AIDS).

2. However thwe advantage of multiple (private or public) projects to tackle the same problem is that any one of them could yield results by tackling things in a different way. Curing AIDS is not riding a treadmill, it's not a case of simply pouring an amount of resources into a hole until it's filled. It could be that AIDS is cured by a startup after only £50k of investment. We won't know until it's done (to an extent).

3. So, we don't know how much the cure for AIDS will cost. In the worst case scenario in [1] a cure might cost £10bn, there are ten firms all following the same path (or a close approximation) and so £100bn will be spent - £90bn which will be "wasted" (again, this is not how things work in the real world, that much money being spent would have numerous side-benefits). The benefit to the cure for AIDS (aside from the people being cured I mean) would go to soley to the patent holder.

4. The traditional market response is that this is good. Crap drug companies go out of business, winners prevail. People take a risk by investing in drugs companies and then get the reward when something like this comes up. But I'm not sure that's an accurate representation of investment in large publicly listed companeis. To quote Mr Nodrog :
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nodrog
Also its worth pointing out that even when it comes to large corporations, talking about 'ownership' can be a bit nebulous anyway - a public company is owned by its shareholders, and in practice these can just be average people (the 'workers' if you will, and in the case of companies which give stock options this is literally true). Even when you have larger shareholders like saving banks and (eg) pension funds invested by trustees, this will be money which in some way represents the savings of average people
So both risk and reward are actually spread (albeit highly unevenly) through society. You might benefit more than your neighbour because GlaxoSmithKline win the "AIDS-cure race" and your pension funds has more GSK shares than your neighbours (whose pension funds were more tilted towards AstraZenaca or Pfizer or whomever).

In summary : It's complex. A single united project (either by all the drugs companies working together but still privately or by a single government project) could be more "efficient" by curing AIDS for a total cost to society of £10bn instead of £100bn by eliminating duplication of work. Or it could be that a single monolithic project may waste £50bn and produce no cure because all funds were pushed down one (errroneous) route. Also, a monopoly project in a sense can't fail - no matter how crap it is, there's no-one for it to lose to.

So it varies from problem to problem. With something's (like mapping data in my linked) I'd argue a single approach is vastly more efficient because it's much more like a "treadmill" problem. With AIDS, it's better that there's multiple projects because afaik no-one knows what a final cure will look like or how we'll get there.

In terms of eliminating patents, obviously I'm all for this but clearly some thought needs to be given to how people are encouraged to invest in "boring" problems like analysing cell samples all day long and other stuff like that. People will happily contribute to Wikipedia because their tiny investment has immediate results and it's easy. If I was to spare a day editing Wikipedia I could probably contribute quite a lot of value (which we could evaluate as being "worth" £100). If I spent a day in a high tech biochem lab trying to "help" cure AIDS I'd contribute nothing of value. We have no way of breaking down certain problems into managable chunks (except in isolated examples like SETI with dubious worth anyway). In the longer term, I think better technology and more advanced concepts will mean that people will be able to help even in bewilderingly complex problems like curing AIDS or Cancer or whatever (and I don't mean just donating procesor cycles for protein modelling). When we get to that stage, patents will lose a lot of their utilitarian justification.

Before that, we'd need large government projects funded out of general taxation to make up for private projects (if we were to abolish patents I mean), which I am dubious of in the current political climate. At the moment, no-one cares if Pfizer spend £xbn making viagra. If it was the NHS Research Fund who did this there'd be loads of faggots complaining about how dare we waste money curing impotence when there's no cure for AIDS/cancer/being black yet (admittedly, they'd have a point, but it'd still be dull).

Of course, regardless which is most "efficient", I still oppose patents on ideological grounds. I'd prefer to have freedoms intact even if it meant never curing cancer (and yes, I have lost family members to cancer). Fortunately, it's not an either/or issue. We will cure these diseases because we are human beings and we will prevail.
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