Read more.EU Competition Commissioner voices concern over Apple and Samsung patent dispute.
Read more.EU Competition Commissioner voices concern over Apple and Samsung patent dispute.
EU needs to force Apple to add browser select to Mac's and IOS devices! Only fair.
[GSV]Trig (23-11-2011),Andeh13 (23-11-2011),Hicks12 (23-11-2011),MaddAussie (23-11-2011),Scribe (23-11-2011)
Betty_Swallocks (28-11-2011)
Couldnt agree more, I'd love to see that. The wheels turning so slowly is frustrating though...
So does significant investment in new IP.
It is a trade off - same as with the development of new medications. Big drug companies aren't in this out of sheer goodwill, they do it to turn a profit. At the end of the period where they have a monopoly on the current drug and generics can be (legally) manufactured they've moved on to the next new drug. It is actually a driving force to continually develop new drugs - which is a good thing. Equally, I can see ready application of the same system to technology - protection for only a limited period, after which it can become a free for all. Safeguards the value of the IP without the expense and anti-competitive implications of patents for an indefinite period.
So threaten the self-interested IP monopolists.
Which is precisely why they'll never stop investing in R&D. It's either keep developing, or shut up shop, because to do otherwise will mean competitors who carry on doing R&D will crush them. But with IP, they're free to develop a medicine, patent it, monopolise the market, and when the patent is close to expiry, tweak the drug, patent it, and carry on monopolising the market.
Documenting the idea, consulting lawyers to draft and submit a patent application for each idea, engineer and lawyer time wasted scouring the market for competing products to attack, communicating with rivals, lodging paperwork with the courts, prosecuting competitors who may or may not have 'stolen' your idea, is all opportunity loss which amounts to extremely vast amounts of time, money, and other resources squandered which could have been spent on R&D and selling products.
Furthermore, ideas develop vastly more rapidly when they're free to be shared, implemented, and improved upon by as many people as possible.
"But with IP, they're free to develop a medicine, patent it, monopolise the market, and when the patent is close to expiry, tweak the drug, patent it, and carry on monopolising the market."
This is very seldom the case. Aside from the requirement for improved efficacy over existing marketed drugs, each 'tweak' results in a new chemical entity which requires full clinical testing. The cost of developing a drug is typically in the $1-2Bn region, sometimes a little less (say $600M) often a fair bit more. Add to that the fact that your patent has very limited lifetime (fewer than 10 years in the market, more likely 5 or so), there's not a lot of time to recoup the investment costs for the successfully marketed drug and all of the previous failed candidates/programmes. Ultimately, as scientists working in drug discovery (I'm working in the anti-cancer academic sector where most of our money comes from charitable donations), we have a goal to alleviate human suffering through our work. IP provides the tools that make this possible - particularly in the private sector, which has to fund itself exclusively. Drug companies get a bad press largely from people who understand very little about drug development, chemical patent law or both.
I would argue that for many of the patents in mobile tech, the risk to the patent owner in terms of development cost versus actual market value of the invention is absolutely minuscule in comparison to the extremely high risks of drug development (which are due to the very high attrition of drugs during the clinical trials process combined with the very high cost of lead and clinical development). That, for me, makes this an unfair comparison to make. Take the patent about shape as an example: Apple haven't invested billions into making the iPhone or the iPad a certain shape, size and aspect ratio. If they use the design patent to block anyone else making a similarly shaped/sized device, it's not to protect their investment, it's to 'harm' the competition for a market advantage.
Scribe (23-11-2011)
That's still a bare assertion. The Dutch were at the forefront of scientific R&D right up until the 19th century when they introduced patent law, they scrapped it 52 years later when they realised they were better off when R&D was liberalised, free of incompetent and wasteful government bureaucracy and anticompetitive monopoly. And frankly, if companies can't make it without vast amounts of cronyism, then they deserve to go out of business. If capitalism can't stand on its own two feet, then medical science should be handled by normal open academic processes, which would be more viable if parasitical corporations weren't gorging on all pertinent resources.
Drug companies get bad press because they're regularly caught doing something deeply unethical. R&D, and patents aside.
Drugs development is incredibly expensive and it can even exceed well over a billion dollars in R and D and testing costs for a single working drug. Firstly you need to understand how a disease is caused,then you need to identify drug targets(which can take a long time),the drug candidates(time consuming and costly) but you also need to have a good understanding of how they function too. Hence the reason why drug companies have invested so much in universities. Most of this preliminary stage work needs to be done in the lab first.
The problem is in quite a few cases even after spending loads on a drug it can fail at the final large scale testing phase meaning all those costs are basically wasted money. This is compounded by the fact that by the time you go through all the testing phases and red tap it can be years until a drug actually enters the market. This is on top of all the basic research needed.
If the companies don't make enough money it not only affects investors but also affects funds for future R and D too. Of this R and D budget a decent chunk goes to academia for research grants. If companies like GSK stopped funding research grants, the affect on UK biomedical and basic research would be catastrophic to say the least.
IMHO,it is time that governments around the world engaged with such companies better,ie, be willing to stump up some of R and D costs for critical drugs in the first place. Hence as part of the agreement these could be sold at a lower cost.
Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 25-11-2011 at 12:35 PM.
Have a read of Bad Science and you'll understand why they get a bad press.
http://www.badscience.net/category/big-pharma/
I understand they give out lots of money to academia and that's totally acceptable, however it doesn't excuse ethical malpractice elsewhere.
That's of course not a completely one-sided, biased website at all...
I'm not defending those cases where bad ethics or bad science are conducted, but I'm also not condoning sensationalist media which is at best naive, and at worst downright wrong. There's so rarely a simple answer to a complex problem, just as there are always two sides to any story. Forming an opinion that 'Big Pharma is Bad' based on what's published in newspapers, magazines or the occasional TV show is as misguided as forming the opinion that 'Drug Companies only benefit mankind' because of those many, many good quality, effective drugs which improve the lives of millions of people.
As I said, I'm in adacemic drug discovery where we are perhaps better placed from the ethical point of view as far as funding goes: we get most of funding from charitable donations. However, we cannot continue the development of a drug past phase 1 clinical trials, and the result is that we *need* to partner our projects with pharma companies. Like it or not, they play an absolutely essential role in all drug discovery and development. The massive cost is at least partly caused by the (justified) immensely complex safety and efficacy requirements for new drugs which are imposed by our society. The rules are absolutely required to ensure best practice in the clinic and in the labs, and in the absolute vast majority of cases, this works.
There may be a few cases of malpractice, and all of us would like to see those eradicated, but frankly it's not on to tar everyone with that brush, which is precisely what anti-pharma media seems to want to do.
Hmm think I might be off topic...!![]()
I would disagree. It's a biased website in that he spends a lot of time and column inches digging up fraudulent and dodgy statistics about various topics - many of which happen to be pharmacy related given that he's a doctor. You mention that you're also in the pharmacy field, which doesn't really make you any less biased.
The main aim of that site and the accompanying book is to demonstrate to the public just how science and statistics are manipulated through malice, cunning or genuine ignorance. It's not just pharma on the block, it's also homeopathy, Gillian McKeith, Brain Gym, and borough councils to mention but a few. One side effect of this is pointing out how ludicrous sensationalist stories are.
Nowhere does he say that pharmaceutical companies are bad, brush and tar, I should point out. Articles are case-by-case, though certain characters pop up frequently.
It's swings and roundabouts with all big companies, sure they fund good research, but have you seen US television? That's what happens when you let pharmaceutical companies advertise to the general public.
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