Do you really want to set a precedent that (intellectual) property rights are suspended in times of crisis? Maybe I have a great idea for curing coronavirus infections, but now I don't want to pour money into to r&d for it because I know that the government won't uphold my patents next time a coronavirus epidemic rolls around.
Couldn't have said it better. "Why would i develop something that could save millions of lives if it will save millions of lives and might not make me money". Absurd
That sounds reasonable to reasonable people, yes. But remember that US presidents have considered us in a state of emergency over a drug pandemic for decades. In the US, power like this will always find a way to be used for racist and nepotistic reasons. We're going from 0 to 100 here real quick, and we need to think through the long-term repercussions a little bit.
if you’re thinking about profit motive at a time like this you are part of the problem. Full stop
People will remember. A decade or two ago, during a flu outbreak that had pandemic potential (I think it was 2006), the government of Indonesia refused to share early samples. The reason? In the past, vaccine manufacturers had refused to sell flu vaccine during pandemics at a discount to the developing country.
From a game-theoretic viewpoint it makes sense - Indonesia isn't worse off if it refuses to cooperate, Indonesian citizens will die anyway. Israel calls this stance "Samson Option".
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary
The irony of posting this sentence on a website displaying royalty free HTML, on a network that was first built to allow royalty free sharing of information between the military and scientists, with the servers running on royalty free GNU/Linux in a web browser based on royalty free Mosaic and discussing the issue with a whole bunch of unpaid people who like to discuss things for the sheer fun of it, is staggering.
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary
This reads very much like the anti-atheist argument of, "Who's going to stop you from raping and pillaging if there's no almighty being keeping you in line?"
It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society.
> It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society.
It most certainly is, I have Christian friends that have used that exact line asking me how I can have morals as an atheist without the threat of a higher diety. As if being nice for the sake of just being nice is an impossible concept. Or in this case that only money would inspire me to do work. As we know from studies, money isn't the only incentive for innovation. In fact at a certain point, ~75k it tends to become less of an incentive.
In a world you share with other humans, not so much.
Let's say you are in a freak accident, and are paralyzed. Will you commit to only getting the care you can actually pay for by your own earnings for the rest of your life?
And how do you bootstrap yourself out of the hundreds of thousands in medical debt for the lifesaving care you get before you even get home?
A lot of things happen around this planet because we care for each other, and we help each other. Sorry you can't see that.
What I understand is that we have decided that one particular measurement, GDP, has been taken to be more valuable than all other measurements. Such as, but not limited to, human welfare.
It's been this way since for decades, and we are now laying in the bed that was made.
I wish I could remember where I read it yesterday—so many articles on the science, but also the policy and history, that they blur together; but someone pointed out "this thing that you (GP imchillyb, not moosey) think is a natural law has actually only been the case for 50 years, and need not continue forever."
At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically.
Those in power want us to believe that current power structures were inevitable, that the world wants to return to the current mean should we try to change it. We just have to stop people from getting power over others. I think that this is best achieved through random selection of leadership.
> At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically.
That's true, and a good point, but this was much more pointed: less "had humanity evolved differently, we could have been nicer people" and more "what seems like the inevitably market- and capitalism-focussed way of life that's all anyone has ever experienced was actually a creation of the '60's and after." (Sort of like the current geopolitics of the US, which seem eternal to those of us, like me, who came of political age when they were already fairly well established, but which have actually changed dramatically in the mere 250-ish years the US has been around to have geopolitics.)
For the "self-interest produces efficiency" people:
Here is a payout diagram for the two-player antisocial/prosocial game:
(A,A)=(6,6)
(A,P)=(15,5)
(P,A)=(5,15)
(P,P)=(12.5, 12.5)
The unique Nash equilibrium is (A,A). That is the United States right now. Please carefully read Adam Smith [1] before making arguments about incentives and efficiency.
As evidence, I present all of the charitable giving and volunteering related to medicine.
It is entirely possible for a thing that saves fewer lives to generate more profit. That's bad, and proves that profit is not 1:1 correlated with value generated.
Jonas Salk was the closest I came to idolizing a person due to this. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of PR on Salk's part. He tried to patent it and was refused. That's not to say he wouldn't have licensed it for free anyway, but he never had to face that moral dilemma.
"They found that it wasn't novel enough to count as a new invention, though. So really, Salk's vaccine was never patented because it was never eligible for a patent, according to Jane S. Smith, who sifted through the March of Dimes' archives for her book "Patenting the Sun."[1]
>And of course, you can defensively patent something and then not enforce the patent too...
That's the same point I made in the above post (albeit through the mechanism of free licensing vs. non-enforcement).
"They" is important because it wasn't self-funded research.
"There was near unanimity within the organization that the public had already paid for the polio vaccine through their donations"[1]
And it wasn't just the March of Dimes. The funding bodies also knew it wasn't patentable. It's not much of a logical leap for Salk to have been part of that discussion and likely had the same conclusion.
"is that legally it was thought to be unpatentable. The National Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh, where much of the work was done, had looked into patenting the vaccine."[2]
It's not meant to disparage Salk. I doubt he would have chosen to patent it even if it was possible. But, like I stated in the previous post, he was never faced with that decision. There's better examples of corporate altruism (some of which are already mentioned in this thread)
The article makes it sounds like a more institutional decision not to move forward, which I think is rather different than attempting to spin a refusal into good personal PR.
Is it capitalism or a broken culture that celebrates avarice?
Capitalism + public industrial policy made some serious progress. Back in the day there used to be this word called "solidarity". Capitalism does quite well when divorced from the weird self-interest dogma we've cultivated over the past 30-40 years.
Say you're a toilet paper maker. In normal times => "your product is trivial to produce, why are you charging so much" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit. In crisis => "why are you thinking about profit" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit.
Meanwhile, you have politicians and multinationals evading tax, landlords and universities exploiting naive & vulnerable populations, Uber & Facebook skirting legislation and making bank, CEOs getting away with billions after burning $50B, elites raping kids and getting away with it, ... real "social responsibility".
Yet nothing that isn't paid for, can get done at any scale. The profit motive here was absurd. But any company that makes something useful for this pandemic, must find a business model that works. Else it won't happen.
Yet nothing that isn't paid for, can get done at any scale.
That doesn't mean it has to be privately funded with an arbitrarily large profit margin, though. In much of the world, we publicly fund some research, we fund quite a lot of medical research through charitable organisations as well, and we operate largely centralised public or at least semi-public healthcare services that buy the end results of the successful research at reasonable rates because of their huge negotiating power.
I think a lot of people from the US who have never been abroad for an extended period might not even realise how far behind normal standards the US really is in terms of how it manages its medical research and healthcare provision. People in much of the world really would assume you were joking if you said someone could go bankrupt just because they were unlucky and got sick, or that vital treatments that could save many lives might be withheld just because of profits.
Ironically, this is one of the main issues that torpedoed a US-EU trade deal not that long ago after many years of negotiations, probably at considerable economic cost to both parties. The general issue of excessive patent rights, and some national issues in member states such as the NHS being the "third rail" of UK politics, turned out to be deal-breakers.
Theranos never had a working product and actively did harm, so I don’t know how having patents would have ever helped them scale that business model.
Beyond that, these are extraordinary circumstances. There will be plenty of bailouts and stimulus for you to scale your business model when the dust settles; let’s focus on scaling our response and systems to meet this crisis first shall we?
Not having to have a working _product_ is actually sensible IMO: maybe patent terms should be limited in such situations (half perhaps).
If I invent a new space rocket, how am I going to keep it quiet, as a small time inventor, long enough to get funding, and build the rocket (we're looking at 1000s of NDAs and warding off an entire rocket production facility from public view) ... do I then have to submit it for testing to make sure it conforms to the invention the patent was applied for? Maybe that requires dismantling it, or witnessing it in operation in an extra-terrestrial planets atmosphere (Mars landing capability, say) ... it's just not workable to require an embodiment to be produced.
Aside: most countries have utility or design patents that protect actual products, but these are in addition to technology patents because working around a single embodiment or design is relatively easy to do, working around a mode of operation is not.
Patent applications are already supposed to be enabling disclosures, that is guides to the skilled person in that field which would enable them to work the invention. This requirement has maybe slipped a bit; but in the US8283155 patent in question they seem to give reasonable information about the operation and scope of their idea [it's not my field].
Yes, I absolutely want to set that precedent: live and death situations are more important than IP rights. You can always sort that kind of stuff out after the fact ("turns out that was a valid patent, and you were licensing it for $X before this all happened, so looks like someone owes you $X and let's figure out who that is"), but you can't get back dead neighbors who were lost due to legal delays.
Weird things like software patents and ludicrously long copyrights aside, the notion of IP has worked out decently for us. There's no way it's more important than directly saving human lives though.
Do you really want to set a precedent that (intellectual) property rights are suspended in times of crisis?
Maybe, but I'd argue that the problem was granting IP rights too strong in the first place. Patents are, in principle, a useful incentive for R&D, but when the products of that R&D are medical in nature, the ethics of allowing them to be withheld become very shaky. In particular, granting patents that allow R&D organisations to recover the true overall cost of their work and make a sufficient profit to justify the endeavour is one thing, but granting patents that allow monopoly providers to set arbitrarily high costs on essential treatments is another thing entirely.
And before anyone suggests that there is no alternative to keep that research going, consider that typically it is not actually the researchers who are raking in those big profits. It is entirely possible that a centrally funded public research service that hired the same experts and provided the same labs and then used its own or external manufacturing facilities for mass production would work out more cost effective for a centralised healthcare system than the current way things work particularly in the US.
Sure but lets not lose sight of the problem here, which is the system's severe abuse. Regardless of if it's a pandemic or not.
Though arguably if a company went ahead and leaped into action and saved millions of lives, when the patent holder didn't lift a finger. There is some debate on whether or not that should be punished and how that should be handled.
Physical property rights are suspended in times of crisis. Why not intellectual property rights?
How is it ethical to let a debate about compensation, which can be had in the future, stop you from saving lives you can save, today? Especially when you're the state and it's literally your job.
Trying to prevent a coronavirus test being used because someone might owe you license fees for which you'll sue in court is plainly murder.
I think a lawyer arguing that should be at minimum disbarred, and possibly jailed, at least like someone who was violating quarantine and trying to infect people on purpose.
You'll find IP legislation has provisions for protecting national security and for use in times of war or other national emergencies; cf UK Patents Act SS 55-59 (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-patent-act-1977).
Post a progress report about any lifesaving tech you develop, or ideas you could get into production, so when the time comes we the people with feelings for each other can shun you into oblivion and solve the problem ourselves.
"If I don't make money from it, I won't bother to help save lives."
We can do without you. Even if you're medicine's Einstein and Edison rolled up together, we'll do without you.
