Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
> Drug patents are much more short-lived
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
> China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen.
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
[1] https://www.swissmedic.ch/swissmedic/de/home/humanarzneimitt...
US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization. They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system. The costs for the producers aren't really a factor.
> US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization.
Of course we do. A lot of the foundational research happens at universities, funded with taxpayer money in the form of research grants.
> They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system.
Only partially. The pharma companies roughly know how much it cost them to get the compound past all the trial stages and how many compounds failed along the path. The usual method is that the rich nations pay for R&D amortization and poor countries pay at-cost for manufacture.
Nearly every convenience of modern civilization is funded with taxpayer money, so that reasoning is without merit.
Yeah, but usually, we pay for stuff with taxes and we benefit.
I wouldn't have much of a problem if China and India would just steal our stuff to benefit their own population - given the widespread poverty there, that's development aid.
But where I draw the line is when China and India undermine our own markets with copycats.
So we should instead pay so that some companies can do huge profits?
Guess why I wrote in my original post that the entire system needs a drastic reform.
What is fundamentally unsustainable is the positive feedback loop of maintaining secrecy or exclusivity on information.
Issue of pharma development is not that you need a protection from copycats. You need to pass a mountain of regulations and bureaucracy. Most of the medications are easily copyable but would take years to be able to get to the market.
See insulin prices difference in europe vs US
> It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
I think this is an inversion of cause and effect.
Are you implicitly arguing that derivative art isn't a thing?
Chinese and Western models on IP are completely different. In our system, the inventor of a Thing gets a period of exclusive rights and everyone who wants to build off of that Thing has to pay license fees to cover the expenses of the original inventor.
In China, copying a Thing is seen completely different (well, at least as far as I know, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt) - an appreciation that the original inventor of the Thing did something good. Getting copied is a symbol of honor.
Both worldviews are completely valid, but it's obvious IMHO that these two views cannot coexist in one single global capitalist economy framework.
I meant more with the timing thing. If a workalike drug undermines the argument for long drug copyright, what are the implications of a copycat plot?
> the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions
Seems like we are coming up on a limit where if they put that much more money into R&D + marketing, then won't be able to afford the product anyway.
So this counterpoint is practically moot for all but the most wealthy people.
But it's much more important that a cancer drug become cheap and readily available than any "youth adult" novel slop
I know someone in pharma.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
> And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
Pay attention to "might". The difference between health insurance and pharma is academic when hate-mongers are asserting authority.
That can be applied to anything, including tech. I don't think bringing in extremes, improves the conversation.
I seem to remember a guy living in a cabin, writing manifestos, and mailing bombs to tech people and academics.
So someone who has suffered incurable harm and damage at the hands of health insurers is a "hate monger" while the health insurance executive prioritising their company profits over human health is just a normal person doing their normal job?
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
To paraphrase John Calvin, "The mind is a factory for rationalizations."
Once we've set ourselves up as judge; jury; and executioner, the unintended consequences abound.
Apt. And that fits both parties in this situation.
Copyright isn’t just fiction novels. Copyright drives investment in books, media, software etc.
Sure. I think copyright is broken far beyond just the length of it, but let's focus on the length of copyright. There's a phenomenon called the Copyright Cliff, where works published from the early to mid 20th century are unavailable far more often than older books. The Atlantic wrote about Paul J. Heald's study of this back in 2013.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h...
> There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
> Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."
And still would all the same with a 20 year term instead of what we have now…
It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.
Not for e. g. 70 years.
I think most people are in support of some financial incentives via protection, but 70 years is just insane.
If anything, the more popular the work, the faster it should be put into the public domain.
A kid growing up obsessed with a franchise is unlikely to ever be permitted to create and sell derivative works within their lifetime.