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Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#91

Post by jcadam »

doki_pen wrote: post #72
ekianjo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. Look at Bio drugs for example. Even when they are to be generiqued, there is almost no company jumping in to make them because it's damn hard to make in the first place and there is very little incentive to do so, so the major players stay in place. A good example: all injectable diabetes drugs, but there are others out there as well.

Absurd, the price of albuterol has gone up 10 fold since patents have been reinforced on it. When companies have patents on life saving drugs they can charge whatever they want. If they have no patent, they are forced to keep the price low enough so no one wants to compete.

The new albuterol inhalers are inferior to the old. The "innovation" was the removal of CFCs (asthma inhalers were an exception to the CFC ban, until recently). This required new, patentable, formulations (though the 'active' ingredient remained the same), which gave us the sucktastic, easy-clogging, overpriced sulfate-based inhalers we have today. The pharma companies were all too willing to go along with the EPA on this one. The FDA and EPA would have you believe this transition went smoothly for asthmatics. They are lying.

Some people are allergic to the new inhalers (sulfates can irritate the airways), which led to the creation of a black market for the old ones, but that supply is bound to run out eventually.

With insurance, I pay about $40 for one of the new inhalers (If you're poor and don't have insurance, you get to die, I guess). Generally they make my breathing more constricted for a minute or two until the albuterol kicks in, so I try to avoid taking a hit from my inhaler unless I'm really having trouble. Nice. Fortunately, since I moved to a beach town on the coast of Florida last year, I haven't needed my inhaler very often. Unfortunately, I'm no longer willing to relocate for work (dirty, city air is the worst), now that I've found a place where the air isn't trying to kill me. :)

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#92

Post by hyperpallium »

icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

A couple of centuries ago there was a movement to abolish patents. What stopped it was cheap imports threatening jobs - patents acted as a kind of import duty. Curiously, that was their origin.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#93

Post by icanhackit »

hyperpallium wrote: post #92
icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

A couple of centuries ago there was a movement to abolish patents. What stopped it was cheap imports threatening jobs - patents acted as a kind of import duty. Curiously, that was their origin.

Relevant: Gongkai https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10353444

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#94

Post by teekert »

crpatino wrote: post #90
teekert wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't an argument at all. It's better for people to be unemployed than to be employed in an enterprise that makes everyone else worse off. Are you hinting at a specific company? I don't think the people that got cured from metastatic cancer would agree that they would be better of without Merck and their PD-L1 antibodies. To be clear I'm responding to ekianjo's > If we could kill patents altogether that would…

> I don't think the people that got cured from metastatic cancer would agree that they would be better of without Merck and their PD-L1 antibodies. Of course they wouldn't; its the relatives of all those who could not afford the drug and died who would be all-in for this! And you seem to believe that the Free Hand of Market does magically fix every problem. Not so. It is just a Hand after all, with no eyes and no bra…

>Of course they wouldn't; its the relatives of all those who could not afford the drug and died who would be all-in for this!

We don't have that problem in the Netherlands so maybe that is what requires fixing. Here, if a drug is too expensive, nobody has access to it (only the ultra rich perhaps) and that creates an incentive to keep drugs affordable to certain extent.

Again I'm not saying the current system is optimal but cancelling the right to monetize your inventions at least until your investment has been earned back seems nothing but reasonable to me.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#95

Post by rayiner »

icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C?

The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of some sort of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend billions on drug R&D and protect them with patents. Even internet companies like Google and Facebook depend on being able to hide a lot of their "secret sauce" (either algorithms or compilations of user information) on the server-side where it can't be easily copied.

Hard R&D that isn't protected from copying is usually subsidized. The core internet protocols were subsidized by the Government. Advances in core browser protocols are subsidized by Internet companies that rely heavily on ad revenue. Going back further in history, Bell Labs was subsidized by AT&T's telephone monopoly and PARC was subsidized by Xerox's copier monopoly. That model can work too, but has its own problems.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#96

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rayiner wrote: post #95
icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C? The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of some sort of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend bi…

Marketing is at least as important as technology. Intel sells chips, not because there are no alternatives, but because they're Intel.

There will be little or no impact on innovation by this patent change.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#97

Post by radu_floricica »

icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

This is a bad question and a horrible attempt to answer (I'm being so abrasive because at this moment this is the highest voted comment). It's a bad question because it invites wishful thinking. Prediction generally has a very bad track record, and right now you're trying to predict a mixture of economy, free market incentives and technology. Hard to find something more unpredictable.

What you can do is look at the past and find correlation and causation. It's reasonably straightforward. Take a number of drugs and treatments, best if done randomly. See the process that got them on the market, and try to figure where patents fit in the picture.

I tried it just for fun, and found something interesting: up to half a century ago, you had a person's name associated with a drug. More recently, and you have a company. This is not an answer, but a hint that maybe things move towards being more expensive. Which of course brings us to the regulatory process: once a drug identified, what is the cost of having the papers stamped and who is motivated to pay for it?

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#98

Post by icanhackit »

rayiner wrote: post #95
icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C? The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of some sort of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend bi…

You make some compelling points but I'm still not convinced that this form of protectionism is the only avenue to innovation. The strength of a company is often in its organization, processes, location, and systems which are difficult to copy in a cohesive way without being gifted with similar circumstances. Why can't a company's strength and success in the marketplace be defined by these characteristics as opposed to legislative shields? Winner-takes-all systems often shape organizational behavior to be more defensive than creative.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#99

Post by zamalek »

mirimir wrote: post #26
ekianjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.

I tend to agree with Cyph0n that patents can promote innovation. But "prior art" ought to be defined sanely. If something has been well known in India for thousands of years, how can some multinational patent it? How can some chemical that occurs in nature be patented? And then there's the whole universe of stuff that's different by one atom over there, and so deemed patentable.

Possibly, patent should have some minimal effort time. After, say, 3 years you have to demonstrably prove that you will take the patent to market. For example, a software product should have some code written that uses the patent, even if incomplete. So long as you do nothing with the patent, anyone can get a royalty free license to it when they challenge you (after the grace period).

This would encourage people to take their innovations to market, instead of sitting on them and bunkrupting anyone else who tries to.

Re: Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision

#100

Post by jerednel »

icanhackit wrote: post #75

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society wo…

Wasn't the completion of the genome in the first place a public effort that actually beat the private sector's attempts to finish it first and keep it away from scientific research? So not sure what we'd lose from keeping it open.
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