Yet Another Nobel Prize Winner Says That Intellectual Property Is Harming Science
from the add-another-one-to-the-list dept
We've discussed in the past how Noble Prize winning economists have been worried about the impact of intellectual property laws, and how at least one Nobel Prize winning physicist is warning that strict intellectual property laws are harming science and innovation. Now we can add a Nobel Prize winning biologist to the list (his Nobel was for medicine). Sir John Sulston has written up a column for The Guardian explaining how intellectual property is "shackling" science:The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. In reality, patents often suppress invention rather than promote it: drugs are "evergreened" when patents are on the verge of running out -- companies buy up the patents of potential rivals in order to prevent them being turned into products. Moreover, the prices charged, especially for pharmaceuticals, are often grossly in excess of those required to cover costs and make reasonable profits.He goes on to attack the massive growth in things like gene patents, which has resulted in: "research on certain genes [being] largely restricted to the companies that hold the patents, and tests involving them are marketed at prohibitive prices. We believe that this poses a very real danger to the development of science for the public good." He points to the long history of how scientific advance has come from collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, rather than the hoarding of it, and fears where things are heading now that knowledge is so often locked up:
For science to continue to flourish, it is necessary that the knowledge it generates be made freely and widely available. IP rights have the tendency to stifle access to knowledge and the free exchange of ideas that is essential to science. So, far from stimulating innovation and the dissemination of the benefits of science, IP all too often hampers scientific progress and restricts access to its products.We keep hearing more and more people who recognize all of this speaking out against what is happening. But the politicians only seem to listen to the lawyers and the lobbyists who have every incentive to ignore the reality around them. How do we change that?
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Filed Under: innovation, intellectual property, john sulston, nobel prize, science
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Hooray for smart people!
(heck, there's a movie title I'd pay to see the movie of)
Somebody should put together a good fact book about this. We'll call it: Intellectual Privilege & What Smart People Think of It. It could also be distributed as a free ebook, just to rub a few other choice noses in reality. Anybody know if Cory Doctorow has time for such a project?
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Re: Hooray for smart people!
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I'm assuming I wish for too much.
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Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai appeared to lend credence to the conspiracy theory that white scientists created HIV to destroy black people. She later apologized.
Nobel prize winner Rigoberta Menchú apparently distorted(?), enhanced(?), well, call it what you may, she apparently made changes to her award-winning autobiography to, well, you can figure out what might make a person change the story of their life.
Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace prize even though he was either directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most violent U.S. activities of his era.
Then there was the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, which caused at least one resignation from the Nobel committee, who labeled Arafat a "terrorist."
Cordell Hull, winner of a Peace Prize in 1945, also strongly influenced the turning away of a ship of refugess in 1939. The refugees returned to Germany and many of the refugees were later executed in Nazi concentration camps.
Physicist Philipp Lenard later created the idea that there were different kind of science, "German Science," "Jewish Science," etc., and later denounce the theory of relativity as a Jewish fraud.
Winning a Nobel prize may lend a speaker a certain cachet, but how important is that cachet with respect to intellectual property? These people are just like any other. They have an opinion based on their personal beliefs, which may or may not have societal value and factual support.
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Lets define what this is... Lets call ... it "Lobbery" a simple merging of the words Robbery and Lobbying.
Lobbery def :
1) The act of soliciting or lobbying for changes in the laws to protect, monopolize, or quash competition, to create financial gains.
2) Throwing an object in an overhand manner.
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He forget to say "for a comparatively short amount of time". How long is a patent for?
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You seem to ignore the massive ripple effects. The basis of innovation is innovation on top of innovation on top of innovation. So, in the course of a year, there may be a dozen innovations on top of an original idea. But with patents that last 17 years, that one year of innovation gets delayed to about two centuries. Nice, huh?
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So the "one year of innovation" happens in the 18th year at worst. In reality, most advancements are licensed out to pay for more research and more development, so the time of a patent doesn't always have the same effect. Further, in publishing the patent, they end up disclosing much about how they got there, which may encourage others to look for other routes to similar or even better results, and that doesn't have to wait 17 years, now does it?
I don't ignore the ripple effects, but you do seem to ignore reality often enough.
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So what happens is...
year 0: 1st innovation
year 18: 2nd round of innovation based on 1st
year 36: 3rd round of innovation based on 2nd
...
Compare it to:
year 0: 1st Round
year 1: 2nd Round
year 3: 3rd Round
Patents are to help disclose information but that's been perverted. The system needs to be reformed to both account for today's faster pace of technology and to promote sharing not restrict it.
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the patent system has been around since the 15th century!! The real aim of the system is to ensure that those who come up with ideas may disclose them in full to the public in exchange for the monopoly which in the past was about 14years(time it took to train 2 apprentices to practice)and is now 20 in most countries.
The IP system is not perfect but it does have some benefit. Inventors have an incentive to disclose their invention in detail (a requirement to obtain a patent).
Patent offices publish all patent applications and their databases are accessible free to access.
ps.. Alfred Nobel had 355 patents to his name.
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No. The point (thought it was clear, guess not, so sorry) is that the next level of innovation gets patented too. So, there goes another 17 years. Twiddle your thumbs and wait.
So the "one year of innovation" happens in the 18th year at worst.
Nope. Just the second step. Then we're locked down again.
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You are desperately looking for a worst case scenerio that isn't happening in the real work. Maybe is happens in Masnick world, but not for the rest of us (otherwise we would still be enjoy them AM radios and TV would be a thing for rich people).
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That sounds horrible!
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You can patent the same thing with minor changes and get another 15 years and go on forever if you want so theoretically a patent can be forever.
That patent will include not only the original but will encompass the changes too so if you have the money to sustain that patent it will be forever.
Patents don't protect the little guy.
Anyone who has ever tried to patent something knows that if you don't patent everything way you can do it you risk loosing it so you have to take dozens if not hundreds of patents on a single idea to "protect" and invention and that cost millions besides there is the annuities that can easily reach $1000 dollars for application so you have a maintenance cost of tens of thousands of dollars.
Who has millions and can pay thousands of dollars anualy?
Not the little guy.
Copyright is even more obnoxious as it encompass derivative works and that is ridiculous but it is even longer reaching 150 years in some cases. Dead artists don't produce anything why do they need protection?
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Example, please.
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You can patent the same thing with minor changes and get another 15 years and go on forever if you want so theoretically a patent can be forever.
That patent will include not only the original but will encompass the changes too so if you have the money to sustain that patent it will be forever.
Patents don't protect the little guy.
Anyone who has ever tried to patent something knows that if you don't patent everything way you can do it you risk loosing it so you have to take dozens if not hundreds of patents on a single idea to "protect" and invention and that cost millions besides there is the annuities that can easily reach $1000 dollars for application so you have a maintenance cost of tens of thousands of dollars.
Who has millions and can pay thousands of dollars anualy?
Not the little guy.
Copyright is even more obnoxious as it encompass derivative works and that is ridiculous but it is even longer reaching 150 years in some cases. Dead artists don't produce anything why do they need protection?
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And what about those genetic tests to determine who needs the relatively cheap preventative treatments to stave off cancer? Not economically feasible for many people because those naturally-occurring genetic mutations are patented. So if they can't get the test done in 17 years, then they'll find out about their predisposition when they are told they have an inoperable, cancerous tumor ... no big deal.
So yea, 17 years is a short time!
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A remarkable thing, you know, is that someone had to finance those things, they had to pay researchers, pay for a lab, pay for all the equipment, and let them go for years and years before they came up with a product. Now, without some way to financially recoup the costs of all of that research, the research wouldn't have happens to start with, or may not have happened in our lifetimes. There is a balance, much of what has pushed science ahead so quickly now is the ability to get financing for the stuff.
Further, and this is just as important, discoveries made in a field often lead to MORE investigations in the same areas, and other solutions are found. It's amazing, but just because there was one erectile dysfunction pill (viagra) didn't stop the makers of Cialis from finding a different and potentially better way to accomplish the same thing. They didn't sit on their hands for 17 years waiting for the clock to tick down, they INNOVATED!
Oh noes! Innovation! What will we have next? Multiple companies selling blood pressure medication, anti-depression drugs, and more than one pain reliever in your pharmacy?
IP minimalists would make us think that there would only be one of each and that would be that, but reality says that is very, very far from the truth.
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The big business don't invest in basic research do they now?
Regenerative medicine is being done by whom in the private sector exactly?
Anti viral research is being done by whom in the private sector?
Most of those researchs are paid by governments the public money.
Not big business. They just rip the rewards without doing the work.
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It's upwards of 15 years to my knowledge, not exactly a short amount of time especially within the realms of science.
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"IP all too often hampers scientific progress"
Well, how often does it move it along, encourage progress? Which is a greater tool?
Back when the govt. was talking about bailouts, I read one Nobel Prize winner in economics saying they would be good. I read one Nobel Prize winner saying they would be bad. They both won the prize, who was right?
3 years ago all the "reliable" scientists agreed that man was causing global warming and we needed to limit the amount of carbon we produce. Now, not so much. My point? We just don't know about a lot of things.
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Your post makes no sense.
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The current IP system has no validity or real value
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Isn't it funny that the guy who won the nobel peace prize just ordered 40,000 more troops to battle? Wasn't he given the award for leading the way to peace? But I digress.
Who do you listen to (between scientists) when two really bright ones tell you to do different things?
Not all theories can be demonstrated to be right or wrong, that is why the scientists are always arguing. Some can be proven, but not the majority.
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Than a lobbyist arguing spin backed by money for self gain.
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The current IP system has no validity or real value
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Intellectual integrity award goes too
look at the past and most recent winners its becoming a joke
scientists will pirate to advance our knowledge
wonder how freemasons think about all that yack about freedom of knowledge yet aid in its restriction
no folks its all about control and i call them out on it
they should be disbanded as a bad force of control
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Useless IP laws
But there is one thing nobody argues.
When a body of research or facts all point to the same thing there is a very good chance that the proposed thing is real.
e.g.: Body of work or proof means the quantity of people saying the same thing or pointing to something.
Anybody will argue with the body of studies that say monopolies are bad?
Anybody can show 1 enduring monopoly in history that was not taken away?
This is the fate of IP laws. to be taken away and be recreated in a later time until a balance is found.
Society is not a static system is a dynamic one and right now IP laws are annoying and useless to the majority of society.
Never mind the fact that only a small group of people take advantage. The little guy's don't have the financial or human resources to make it work for them. It is used as a weapon to fend off competition and not fuel it.
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Re: Useless IP laws
A second enduring monopoly that has yet to be taken away. The formula for Coke. There are those who claim the "secret" is no longer secret, but the several versions of the formula that all exist disagree and are from a long time ago, before several critical changes to the formula. No one knows the current formula.
Would you care for more? There are many.
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Coca-Cola is even more of a monopoly than many other trademarks. Because of the "famous name" portion of trademark law, the consumer confusion aspects have been muted in favor of unfair competition. Coca-Cola has become so famous that any usage of "Coca-Cola" immediately evokes one company. Therefore, it is close to impossible for there to be a non-infringing use, which thus means that Coca-Cola has a virtually absolute monopoly over the name.
As for the market, Coca-Cola claims clothing, an array of decorations, advertising, ad infinitum. Their "markets" are extremely broad considering they started life as a carbonated beverage.
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Scientists are often full of shit, it's true. But not nearly as full of shit as you are.
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Patents are forever.
Continuations rules:
http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/exam/presentation/clmcontfinalrule.jsp
Guide on how to extend patents
http://biopharminternational.findpharma.com/biopharm/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=150834
Evergreening
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ health-and-families/health-news/drug-giants-swindle-nhs-by-blocking-cheap-medicines-extending-patent s-793129.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/06/1091732084185.html
In the Pharma business there is not one example, there is lots of examples but it is not only the pharma business doing it, new formulations can be read as new improved forms that can be added to the patent and granted extensions based on the continuation rules.
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Re: Patents are forever.
Only certain patents can be extended, on pharmaceuticals, only because of the length of time it takes to get a drug approved. Regardless of the length of time for approval, the maximum length of time a pharmaceutical patent can be in force is 14 years with the single permitted extension. Not only is 14 years far less than "forever," it is far less than the typical length of a non-pharmaceutical patent.
Note in the "evergreening" link you posted, nearly all the strategies were not in extending the life of patents, which is not possible, but in delaying the entry of generics through a variety of techniques. There is a short section in that article in strategies that companies might use to gain an additional monopoly, but not one of those strategies prevented a competitor from creating a generic version of the original, patented drug. Ergo, you have yet again failed to prove, not only "forever," but even any sort of "very long" period of time.
Your next link, to an article from the Independent, while it described an attempt in the UK to change from a capsule to a tablet (the patentable reason for this was never explained - and such shallow attempts have been litigated in U.S. courts and held to be unpatentable improvements), the article did not say the attempt was successful. It is interesting that the title talks about "extending" patents, and yet it did not provide any examples of successful attempts to do so.
The final article is even less helpful than the previous articles. Though the article keeps using the term "evergreening," if finally gets around to explaining that "evergreening" of patents has nothing to do with the patents at all, but raising objections to entry of generic firms through a series of protests. Though it should be obvious, these objections have absolutely nothing to do with PATENT law and you will not find any of these supposed "evergreening" rules in patent law. These techniques are instead related to how drugs are approved by the FDA.
Your articles fall into two categories. The first category, relating to continuations and patent term extensions, are related to patent law. Those rules are fixed. In the case of extensions, all continuations expire at the same time as the original. In the case of pharmaceutical patents, an extension up to five years is possible, but in no case is an in force length greater than 14 years permitted. Neither of these examples support anything even close to "two centuries."
Your other examples focus on attempts by drug companies to slow the entry of competitors into the market place through various non-patent challenges or to change formulations in a minor manner in order to get a new patent.
There are two problems with the second strategy. First, the USPTO has wised up to these attempts and has routinely been rejecting them. Second, if the USPTO errs then competitors have been challenging the patents in court, and routinely succeed when the supposed improvement does not change the nature of the medication. Third, the original patent has still expired and is available to produce the original patent medication.
As to the various challenges to entry based on safety, etc., i.e, non-patent based challenges, those challenges do sometimes succeed for short periods of time, but hardly "two centuries."
You have failed to provide any support for the contention that patents can last forever.
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Patents are forever and thus useless for society.
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Re: Patents are forever and thus useless for society.
I believe people who fail to follow traffic laws are "bad," but again that is a value statement. Why are people who fail to follow traffic laws "bad"? Well, because they are criminals. Have they created a public danger? Sometimes they do. Obviously, someone who violates a traffic law and then causes harm to someone else would be considered, in general, to be bad. But the term is full of interpretation and will never mean the same thing to two people.
You should avoid "good" and "bad" when possible.
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Re: Re: Patents are forever and thus useless for society.
I believe they are evil.
As the man said, they lead to corruption, fights, etc.
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I believe they are evil.
As the man said, they lead to corruption, fights, etc.
Actually, the word "believe" works for me. When you say that your system of beliefs includes that patents are evil, then you have moved over into religion, which only requires faith and belief versus actual evidence. It is hard to sway beliefs, no matter how ill-founded they may be.
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Re: Patents are forever and thus useless for society.
In order to refute your contention that "there is no proof that a monopoly ever benefited society," I need only provide one supported example. So, let's give it a shot...
It has generally been decided that dispersion of technology is a benefit to society by many commenters on this web site. Assuming that dissemination of knowledge is beneficial to society, then patents have benefited society based on a study done by Sokoloff, Lamoreaux and Kahn that showed that patented innovations "tend to be traded more than those that are not, and therefore to disperse geographically farther away from the original area of invention."
Foreign investment is often a desire by many societies. Such investment is considered a societal good, particularly in some developing countries. Boldrin and Levine provided a summary of 23 studies on patenting and innovation, noting that "strengthening IP increases the flow of foreign investment in sectors where patents are frequently used."
Another societal goal can be research and development. Kanwar and Evanson summarized data for 31 countries in the period 1981 to 1990. They found a correlation between higher patent protection and increases in research and development as a fraction of GDP.
Chun-Ya Tseng and Cheng-Hwai Liou in "Valuation of R&D and Patent: An Economic Value Added Perspective," found a positive correlation between R&D and patents and the financial success of 219 Taiwanese electronic companies sampled from 1990 to 2003. This paper also provides many references to other papers supportive of the value to the economic health of companies. These companies employed tens of thousands of people, providing employee benefits and taxes to support social services.
The entry of new companies into the market place increases competition in the long term. Also, smaller companies have been shown to be more innovative per person than larger companies. Thus, entry of new companies is likely beneficial to society. Hall and Ham noted that their "results suggest that stronger patents may have facilitated entry by firms in niche product markets..."
States typically use various methods of measuring income growth and consider income growth to be a benefit to society. A 2006 study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that the single best predictor of how a state's income will grow is the number of patents in the state per capita. Education ranked second.
Albert G.Z. Hu and I.P.L. Png, in their extremely well researched paper "Patent Rights and Economic Growth: Cross-Country Evidence," found a positive mathematical relationship between patents and economic growth. From their conclusion:
Using an ISIC 3-digit industry level database that spans 54 manufacturing industries in 72 countries between 1981-2000, we found evidence that stronger property rights were associated with faster industrial growth measured by value added. The impact of stronger patent righs was both statistically and economically significant in three of the four periods we analyzed: 1981-85, 1991-95, and 1996-2000, and had become stronger in the 1990s compared to the in the 1980s.
Our analysis also showed that the stronger patent rights promoted industrial growth through technical progress in the 1981-85 and 1996-2000 periods and through more rapid factor accumulation in the 1991-95 period.
As crop failures and increases in diseases threatened food supplies in the 1960's, the U.S. government wondered how to get more industry involvement in creating new, disease-resistant plants. Surely assuring food supplies is beneficial to society. Of note was that about 150 new plant varieties were developed in the U.S. in the 1960's, which was believed to be insufficient to protect food supplies. The Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 provided patent protection for sexually reproducing plants. In the 1970's, over 3,000 new plant species were developed.
While monopolies may be "bad" in your opinion, there is apparently a lot of societal benefit that derives from them, based on study after study after study.
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@52
And after those breakthroughs companies came to partner with them to further develop something and still the company Lil something got all the credit for it.
Most cancer drugs come from public research you can go and verify all you want :)
Stem cell research is almost all public funds as are almost all cutting edge research on the medical field.
Just go ahead and count how many discoveries big pharma did and how many discoveries public funded research made it. It is not even funny.
@51:
Nope, bad is the final conclusion one have when they take a good look at the body of work about monopolies. Don't believe me go research and just count how many works there are that say that it is good and how many say it is bad. If the ratio is 10 to 1 saying it is bad I would not be surprised because rarely I see some fool trying to say that monopolies are good.
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Re: @52
I am unsure that this statement is true. According to references, Ciba-Geigy was the first company to develop fully synthetic insulin. That sounds like a breakthrough from a private company.
However, what is your point with this statement?
And after those breakthroughs companies came to partner with them to further develop something and still the company Lil something got all the credit for it.
Actually, histories seem to show that the only thing that Lily did was mass produce insulin. I do not see where Lilly received any patents for insulin. According to Wikipedia, insulin was developed in the University of Toronto. According to Wikipedia, Lilly had a "major breakthrough" in figuring out how to mass produce insulin - not the developers of insulin or the University of Toronto.
Most cancer drugs come from public research you can go and verify all you want :)
Okay. How many of those cancer drugs are patented by pharmaceutical companies?
Stem cell research is almost all public funds as are almost all cutting edge research on the medical field.
Nice, unsupported statement.
Just go ahead and count how many discoveries big pharma did and how many discoveries public funded research made it. It is not even funny.
No, you provide references that count them. Also, point to the references that show how many publicly funded inventions are patented by private companies.
@51:
Nope, bad is the final conclusion one have when they take a good look at the body of work about monopolies. Don't believe me go research and just count how many works there are that say that it is good and how many say it is bad. If the ratio is 10 to 1 saying it is bad I would not be surprised because rarely I see some fool trying to say that monopolies are good.
If we count the objective research into intellectual property, it appears that nearly ALL intellectual property research has indicated at least some benefit to intellectual property. Are there potential disadvantages? Yes, also reported by objective reports. What is more interesting is that the very few papers that study the balance of benefits indicate that patents have more benefits than disadvantages. But hey, you already read that - you just ignored it.
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If it was real research, it would not have used the terms "good" and "bad," which are not quantifiable in an objective way. Good and bad are merely characterizations of likes and dislikes.
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New IP Law idea
If you don't want people copying your process, don't patent it for the world to know.
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Re: New IP Law idea
Wow. I suspect you have never run your own business (or graduated grade 8 for that matter).
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No one living in the United States has ever been given a drug (outside of trials) that has not gone through the trials. Period.
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Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize Winner, also said that Vitamin C prevented cancer. Linus Pauling died of ... cancer. Nobel Prize winners are not perfect.
Granted, politicians and lobbyists have almost negative informational content, but let's not reach for lousy debate tactics in an attempt to support your point.
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The funny thing is the person you responded to made his point with real world, historical examples whereas you were content to mud-sling.
You are a disservice to your own agenda. Keep up the good work!
Oh noes! Innovation! What will we have next? Multiple companies selling blood pressure medication, anti-depression drugs, and more than one pain reliever in your pharmacy? IP minimalists would make us think that there would only be one of each and that would be that, but reality says that is very, very far from the truth.
Indeed.
IP monopolies do not negate competition. On the contrary, there is lots of competition inside every IP-based industry despite all the requisite monopolies. At it's core, it's "little monopolies" competing with other "little monopolies" rather than a single, market-owning, behemoth crushing everyone underfoot (as the "But mommy I waaaant it!" freemunists would have you believe).
ps.. Alfred Nobel had 355 patents to his name.
hahaha, what a perfect little factoid in the context of this thread.
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