American Medical Association Claims False Copyright Over President Obama's Journal Article

from the that's-not-how-it-works,-ama dept

You may have heard that earlier this week President Obama published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) entitled: United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps. It follows typical medical journal format and has lots of charts and figures. A number of people remarked that this must be a first for how the "Author Affiliations" were listed: Whatever you might think of the President's health care policy, you should absolutely appreciate the willingness to publish data and details like this -- and to make it freely available online. But there's something that's still problematic here. And it has a lot more to do with the American Medical Association than the President. And it's that -- in typically idiotic closed access medical journal fashion -- JAMA is claiming the copyright on the article. There's a copyright permissions link in the righthand column, and if you click on it, you get taken to a page on Copyright.com, a site run by the Copyright Clearance Center, claiming that the copyright for this document is held by the American Medical Association: And if you click to download the PDF version of the article, which I've embedded below on the bottom of every page, it claims that the document is covered by a copyright held by the American Medical Association. To put it simply: this is bullshit. Section 105 of US copyright law makes it quite explicit that "any work of the United States Government" cannot be covered by copyright. When the President writes a journal article (and he's listed as the sole author), the document is automatically in the public domain and not subject to copyright. I recognize that, since the AMA obnoxiously wants to claim and take every copyright from every one of its authors, it might not be set up to handle publishing a document in the public domain, but it should figure out how to make an exception, because what it's doing right now is outright copyfraud, claiming copyright on something it does not have the rights to.

And some people have noticed. Professor Michael Eisen, from UC Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has sent a letter to the President asking him to ask JAMA to correct this error: If you can't read it, the key section reads:

I would like to bring to your attention an issue that you, as both a constitutional lawyer and President sworn to uphold the laws of the United States, will, I hope, find of interest. As you are undoubtedly aware, US copyright law (specifically section 105) states that copyright protection is not available to works of the federal government. I believe that we can safely assume that a work penned by you as part of your official duties as President is subject to this provision. Nonetheless, the official electronic copy of your article (attached) bears the statement "Copyright 2016 American Medical Association. All rights reserved" on every page in clear violation of coypyright law.

I would like to humbly request that you demand on behalf of citizens of the United States that JAMA remove this illegal copyright claim from your paper. Furthermore, I hope that you can use the opportunity afforded by this incident to shed light [on] the broader issue of scientific journals illegally claiming copyright in thousands of other works of the US government every year, thereby restricting access to and use of these works which by law belong in the public domain.

Hopefully something happens.

Filed Under: copyright, health care reform, jama, president obama, public domain
Companies: american medical association

Senator Sanders Introduces Medical Innovation Prize Bills

from the alternatives-to-funding-drugs dept

For those who recognize the very significant problems associated with pharmaceutical patents, one popular alternative is to set up an innovation prize system, where the government sets aside large sums of cash as a reward for those who create a drug-based cure for certain issues. Senator Bernie Saners has now introduced two bills that would create potentially giant funds for such efforts -- one directed just at AIDS/HIV and one at much wider medical innovation. The bigger bill would set aside .55 percent of US GDP, or more than $80 billion per year right now. That's a pretty big chunk 'o change. The important parts are that it would also set aside at least 5% of the money to go to "open source" medical innovation efforts, which could mean about $4 billion going into open source research.

Of course, this isn't the first time Senator Sanders has suggested such a thing. Four years ago, he introduced a similar effort. As we noted at the time, there's almost no chance that this goes anywhere, because it's a plan that's simply too radical and would upset way too many special interests. That said, while I do think that this would definitely be significantly better than what we have now, I'm not at all convinced it's a good plan overall. To make this easy, I'll just repost what I said four years ago:

If the plan actually worked, and created new, more affordable drugs that saved many more lives, you could make a compelling argument that the net benefit to the economy would far outweigh the $80 billion (see Murphy and Topel's research for support on that). However, it's still not going to be easy to get people to buy into it. More importantly, it's not entirely clear how you'd allocate this money fairly. Any system like this where the gov't is giving away money is going to be gamed by the pharma companies in one way or another. It'll be so lucrative that it will be nearly impossible not to have the system gamed -- especially when it's going to involve a bunch of bureaucrats trying to determine the value of a specific drug. Finally, the bill seems to be entirely focused on pharmaceuticals -- which is part of the problem today. With so much healthcare policy focused on pharma, people forget that new technologies may start to make pharmaceuticals obsolete. Then we're left with an $80 billion subsidy for an industry that should be going away. I'm all for the economic incentives that come from innovation prizes, but building a huge mis-targeted gov't bureaucracy around them seems risky. Really, it seems to just be replacing one system of gov't subsidies with a different one, and that hardly seems likely to fix the problems currently facing the healthcare space.

Again, this would definitely be better than what we have now, but I think it just replaces one market-distorting government subsidy setup with a different one.

Filed Under: bernie sanders, drugs, health care reform, innovation prizes, patents, pharmaceuticals

Pay-For-Delay Ban Dropped From Health Care Reform

from the of-course dept

While plenty of folks are still digging through what the new health care reform (really medical insurance reform) law really means (and it's likely not what you hear most of the TV pundits talking about), it's unfortunate to hear that the provision to ban "pay for delay" schemes from pharma companies was removed. We talked about these sneaky deals last year. Basically, big pharma companies threaten (and often sue) the makers of generic drugs, just before a drug is about to go off patent. There is no actual patent infringement as the basis of the lawsuit, but the lawsuit acts as a negotiating ploy, with part of the "settlement" being an agreement from the generic drug maker not to enter the market. It's a blatantly anti-competitive move. Basically, the pharma companies leverage their gov't granted monopoly to build up a bunch of cash, which they can then use to pay off potential competitors in order to keep that monopoly for years past the expiration of the patent.

It makes drugs much more expensive for everyone while being a clearly anti-competitive practice. So it seemed like a good thing that the health care reform bill was supposed to ban it. Until... of course... it was removed days before the bill was approved. No matter what your take is on health care reform, it's hard to see any reason to allow this kind of practice to continue, and even if it wasn't included in the the health care reform bill, and isn't included in the current patent reform bill, it seems like there's no reason the FTC can't just step in and make the point that this is blatantly anti-competitive. The FTC knows this is a problem -- and has even said that these sorts of deals have cost US citizens $3.5 billion per year in higher drug costs.

Filed Under: drugs, health care reform, patents, pay for delay, pharmaceuticals