Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses [LWN.net]

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Sep 30, 2010 15:57 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses by FlorianMueller
Parent article: Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski

In the event you are against pharma patents, you're entitled to your opinion but you won't convince any political decision-making body anywhere in the civilized free world that pharma patents should go away.

You haven't heard my argument, so how would you know that it wouldn't convince anybody unless you believe that either no argument is sufficient for the abolition or curtailment of pharmaceutical and life science patents or that everyone who needs to be convinced is already thoroughly and irreversibly corrupted by the idea that the availability of medicines must be driven on a purely profit-oriented basis?

The alternative would be state-run research aka the most radical form of communism.

Because, after all, states have absolutely no interest in funding research into keeping their citizens healthy/alive? Even the US government spends considerable amounts of money on medical research (from which corporations have benefited hugely), so maybe a reanimation of Senator McCarthy is necessary to combat this "form of communism". If nothing else, it would at least provide this discussion with a participant who might share your enthusiasm for such alarmist and unfounded rhetoric.

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Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Sep 30, 2010 16:06 UTC (Thu) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]

The thing I said about "state-run research" didn't relate to a certain amount of government-funded research, which obviously takes place everywhere in the capitalist world, but to replacing the entire private research sector with state-run research.

In terms of your argument that I haven't heard, I was cautious enough to say "[i]n the event" up front. I still don't see an argument that pharma doesn't need patents, and if I saw one some other time, we might slip off topic at some point.

I used generic drugs as an example. The companies providing them do very limited R&D. It's nice for consumers if their perspective is shortsighted; but they also want the next generation of drugs to be researched and those investing in that research (plus those taking the risk of original market introduction) must be incentivized and protected. That was the perspective. I'd be very interested in analogies from other industries. That would be more useful than a debate on the validity of pharma patents (I don't see any parliament in the industrialized world even talking about the possibility of abolishing those patents).