http://tinyurl.com/9vvsvob

Interesting idea I suppose.

About 50% of the comments seem to be "No, we should just ban ALL 
PATENTS! Because patents are EVIL! All you guys are doing is 
legitimising patents."

Now maybe we don't need software patents. I don't know. But what I *do* 
know is this: The pharmaceutical industry wouldn't exist without patents.

You see, a drug is a bit like a big-budget movie: It costs *billions* of 
dollars to develop and test a drug to the point where it gets licensed 
for use on humans. But once the drug has been invented, it costs about 
0.0003 USD per pill to manufacture the stuff. The *only* reason anyone 
is willing to pay billions of dollars to develop new drugs is that they 
know that if it gets licensed, then for the next X years they can sell 
this stuff for $$$ per pill - i.e., vastly more than what it costs to 
manufacture.

Without patents, a company would spend billions on making a new drug, 
get it licensed, and then every other company on the globe would start 
manufacturing it and selling it for peanuts - because, let's face it, 
they have no design costs to recoup.

Of course, this would not happen - what would *actually* happen is that 
nobody would develop new drugs in the first place. And that would be 
pretty catastrophic.

So what's the alternative? Honestly, I don't know... Perhaps if drug 
licenses were only granted to the company that did all the safety 
testing? That might work?

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I think you're case for the pharmaceuticals is a bit biased towards the 
official propaganda of those companies.
Reality is much more complex.
There is the problem that very few new medicines come on the market. The 
rules are probably just too strict. And the main improvements are mostly 
done, most things nowadays are statistical improvements. What the 
companies are doing is finding ways to extend an existing patent, not 
creating new ones. (A bit like Walt Disney finding ways to extend the IP 
on mickey mouse indefinitely.) The money they earn with that only for a 
small fraction goes into research, most of it goes to marketing. Which 
often means that a new patient group is identified (or conjured from 
thin air) and doctors are pushed to prescribe it. Backed by scientific 
studies that are less objective than one would hope.
In the mean time proven effective medicine is withdrawn from the market, 
because they make more money on another medicine.
And we need Bill Gates to fund the medicines that are needed but not 
profitable.
It is clear that the current way of funding medicines has a lot of 
problems, but we don't have a better alternative yet.




On 21-9-2012 17:57, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> http://tinyurl.com/9vvsvob
>
> Interesting idea I suppose.
>
> About 50% of the comments seem to be "No, we should just ban ALL
> PATENTS! Because patents are EVIL! All you guys are doing is
> legitimising patents."
>
> Now maybe we don't need software patents. I don't know. But what I *do*
> know is this: The pharmaceutical industry wouldn't exist without patents.
>
> You see, a drug is a bit like a big-budget movie: It costs *billions* of
> dollars to develop and test a drug to the point where it gets licensed
> for use on humans. But once the drug has been invented, it costs about
> 0.0003 USD per pill to manufacture the stuff. The *only* reason anyone
> is willing to pay billions of dollars to develop new drugs is that they
> know that if it gets licensed, then for the next X years they can sell
> this stuff for $$$ per pill - i.e., vastly more than what it costs to
> manufacture.
>
> Without patents, a company would spend billions on making a new drug,
> get it licensed, and then every other company on the globe would start
> manufacturing it and selling it for peanuts - because, let's face it,
> they have no design costs to recoup.
>
> Of course, this would not happen - what would *actually* happen is that
> nobody would develop new drugs in the first place. And that would be
> pretty catastrophic.
>
> So what's the alternative? Honestly, I don't know... Perhaps if drug
> licenses were only granted to the company that did all the safety
> testing? That might work?
>


-- 
Women are the canaries of science. When they are underrepresented
it is a strong indication that non-scientific factors play a role
and the concentration of incorruptible scientists is also too low

Post a reply to this message

On 21/09/2012 07:27 PM, andrel wrote:
> I think you're case for the pharmaceuticals is a bit biased towards the
> official propaganda of those companies.
> Reality is much more complex.

I see...

> There is the problem that very few new medicines come on the market.

Cool. So all those "first time in man" drugs I've helped my ex-employers 
work on... apparently those didn't actually exist, right?

> The rules are probably just too strict.

This is somewhat outside my area of expertise, but IMHO the rules are 
reasonably OK ATM.

> And the main improvements are mostly
> done, most things nowadays are statistical improvements.

While it's true that there are plenty of cases of designing a new drug 
which is like an existing one but slightly different in some way, it's 
also true that there are plenty of people scouring the tropical 
rainforests, the great coral reefs, and the bottom of the oceans to find 
unusual molecules that do something interesting. Most drugs are "found" 
rather than "designed". Oh, sure, the molecule you find might not be 
perfect; you might need to do some design work to improve it. But the 
basic design is from mother nature's kitchen, mostly.

> What the
> companies are doing is finding ways to extend an existing patent, not
> creating new ones. (A bit like Walt Disney finding ways to extend the IP
> on mickey mouse indefinitely.)

Again, while I'm sure they /do/ try to find inventive ways to keep 
milking their stuff for every last penny, that doesn't mean that there's 
nothing new coming out.

> The money they earn with that only for a
> small fraction goes into research, most of it goes to marketing.

Now /that/ I can believe...

> In the mean time proven effective medicine is withdrawn from the market,
> because they make more money on another medicine.

I doubt that. Usually once a drug comes off patent, a whole raft of 
other companies step in to start copying it. (My ex-employers got quite 
a lot of contracts from companies wanting to investigate the properties 
of drugs that have just recently come off patent.)

> And we need Bill Gates to fund the medicines that are needed but not
> profitable.

Sadly, that is probably true. It costs a fortune to develop a drug; 
you're probably not going to bother for something extremely rare. (Who 
would you test it on anyway?) Meaning that if you contract a very rare 
disease... you're kind of screwed.

> It is clear that the current way of funding medicines has a lot of
> problems, but we don't have a better alternative yet.

I agree with this sentence.

Post a reply to this message

On 21/09/2012 04:57 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> About 50% of the comments seem to be "No, we should just ban ALL
> PATENTS! Because patents are EVIL! All you guys are doing is
> legitimising patents."

One irritated commenter posted this link:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/anew.all.pdf

It's going to take me... a while to read all that. But it seems quite 
interesting.

Post a reply to this message

On 21-9-2012 22:39, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 21/09/2012 07:27 PM, andrel wrote:
>> I think you're case for the pharmaceuticals is a bit biased towards the
>> official propaganda of those companies.
>> Reality is much more complex.
>
> I see...
>
>> There is the problem that very few new medicines come on the market.
>
> Cool. So all those "first time in man" drugs I've helped my ex-employers
> work on... apparently those didn't actually exist, right?

Did you follow them up afterwards? And did you check that claims?
Many of those would have been (hopefully) irrelevant variants of 
something existing.

>> The rules are probably just too strict.
>
> This is somewhat outside my area of expertise, but IMHO the rules are
> reasonably OK ATM.

Reasonable, but not the best in the interest of patients.

>
>> And the main improvements are mostly
>> done, most things nowadays are statistical improvements.
>
> While it's true that there are plenty of cases of designing a new drug
> which is like an existing one but slightly different in some way, it's
> also true that there are plenty of people scouring the tropical
> rainforests, the great coral reefs, and the bottom of the oceans to find
> unusual molecules that do something interesting. Most drugs are "found"
> rather than "designed". Oh, sure, the molecule you find might not be
> perfect; you might need to do some design work to improve it. But the
> basic design is from mother nature's kitchen, mostly.

Did you do research on that or just watch Discovery Channel now and then?

>> What the
>> companies are doing is finding ways to extend an existing patent, not
>> creating new ones. (A bit like Walt Disney finding ways to extend the IP
>> on mickey mouse indefinitely.)
>
> Again, while I'm sure they /do/ try to find inventive ways to keep
> milking their stuff for every last penny, that doesn't mean that there's
> nothing new coming out.

The rate of truly new drugs has been declining over the last decades, 
despite all the research. One of the problems is that most diseases are 
too complex. If you have a broadly defined disease, 'heart failure' for 
instance you have the number of patients for a new drug. Only, some 
subgroups will benefit and some others will get worse. On average there 
is only a small effect, possibly even negative. Which means that the 
drug never goes to market. (Unless it is a small effect but the target 
patient group is (after marketing) extremely numerous, as in the case of 
statins) You might figure out which subgroups do benefit and which are 
harmed, but then the group becomes too small to make a reasonable 
profit. Or the identification is too complicated to make sense for the 
general hospitals and GPs.

>> The money they earn with that only for a
>> small fraction goes into research, most of it goes to marketing.
>
> Now /that/ I can believe...
>
>> In the mean time proven effective medicine is withdrawn from the market,
>> because they make more money on another medicine.
>
> I doubt that. Usually once a drug comes off patent, a whole raft of
> other companies step in to start copying it. (My ex-employers got quite
> a lot of contracts from companies wanting to investigate the properties
> of drugs that have just recently come off patent.)

So no new drugs actually...
But I meant that they are taken off market before the patent expires to 
be replaced by an almost identical one that has a more recent patent or 
they can charge more for. Or simply taken off market because it is too 
cheap.
 From my limited experience with drugs in the clinic I know at least one 
example of the latter. Probably quite a lot of drugs never enter the 
market because they are too cheap to produce. You would hope and expect 
that governments would step in to fill that gap, but 'somehow' that does 
not happen.


>> And we need Bill Gates to fund the medicines that are needed but not
>> profitable.
>
> Sadly, that is probably true. It costs a fortune to develop a drug;
> you're probably not going to bother for something extremely rare. (Who
> would you test it on anyway?) Meaning that if you contract a very rare
> disease... you're kind of screwed.

Indeed. We are talking about rare diseases like malaria and other 
tropical diseases.

>> It is clear that the current way of funding medicines has a lot of
>> problems, but we don't have a better alternative yet.
>
> I agree with this sentence.


-- 
Women are the canaries of science. When they are underrepresented
it is a strong indication that non-scientific factors play a role
and the concentration of incorruptible scientists is also too low

Post a reply to this message

>> Cool. So all those "first time in man" drugs I've helped my ex-employers
>> work on... apparently those didn't actually exist, right?
>
> Did you follow them up afterwards? And did you check that claims?
> Many of those would have been (hopefully) irrelevant variants of
> something existing.

I don't doubt some of them were just variants on something existing. 
(That's surely a much cheaper way to design a new drug.) From what 
little I saw, some of them were also brand new. (And yes, I don't doubt 
some of them never saw the light of day in the end. That's why we /test/ 
these things, after all...)

>>> The rules are probably just too strict.
>>
>> This is somewhat outside my area of expertise, but IMHO the rules are
>> reasonably OK ATM.
>
> Reasonable, but not the best in the interest of patients.

How so?

> Did you do research on that or just watch Discovery Channel now and then?

I don't actually have access to the Discovery Channel, annoyingly 
enough. (Still, I bet it's not as good as everybody says it is...)

> The rate of truly new drugs has been declining over the last decades,
> despite all the research.

Do you have an actual citation for that?

> One of the problems is that most diseases are
> too complex. If you have a broadly defined disease, 'heart failure' for
> instance you have the number of patients for a new drug. Only, some
> subgroups will benefit and some others will get worse. On average there
> is only a small effect, possibly even negative. Which means that the
> drug never goes to market. (Unless it is a small effect but the target
> patient group is (after marketing) extremely numerous, as in the case of
> statins) You might figure out which subgroups do benefit and which are
> harmed, but then the group becomes too small to make a reasonable
> profit. Or the identification is too complicated to make sense for the
> general hospitals and GPs.

Or, to put it another way, sometimes you can't just inject somebody with 
a chemical and make everything better again.

> But I meant that they are taken off market before the patent expires to
> be replaced by an almost identical one that has a more recent patent or
> they can charge more for. Or simply taken off market because it is too
> cheap.
> From my limited experience with drugs in the clinic I know at least one
> example of the latter.

Oh, the original designer of the drug might stop selling it. But once 
the patent expires, anybody who wants to can make the stuff. I'm telling 
you, we regularly got contracts relating to this very activity.

> Probably quite a lot of drugs never enter the
> market because they are too cheap to produce.

That doesn't even make /sense/. The price a drug sells for is usually 
unrelated to the cost of producing it. (Until the patent expires, anyway...)

>>> And we need Bill Gates to fund the medicines that are needed but not
>>> profitable.
>>
>> Sadly, that is probably true. It costs a fortune to develop a drug;
>> you're probably not going to bother for something extremely rare. (Who
>> would you test it on anyway?) Meaning that if you contract a very rare
>> disease... you're kind of screwed.
>
> Indeed. We are talking about rare diseases like malaria and other
> tropical diseases.

I didn't think that malaria was rare, or that nobody has developed drugs 
to treat it...

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On 21/09/2012 10:29 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> One irritated commenter posted this link:
>
> http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/anew.all.pdf
>
> It's going to take me... a while to read all that. But it seems quite
> interesting.

I said it would take me a while to read it all! I only just finished. 
Man, that was *a lot* of text...

While many of their arguments make a great deal of sense, I'm still not 
completely sold on a few things.

The argument against patents seems clear. They should go.

The exception is the pharmaceutical industry. That's because 
pharmaceuticals require absurdly expensive testing before you're allowed 
to sell them. But, as the authors point out, the purpose of testing is 
to find out *if* a new drug works. If that work is funded by the company 
that just spent $$$ inventing that drug... well, can you spell "conflict 
of interest"? So perhaps we need a system where somebody else funds 
clinical testing. If we can sort that out, then making new drugs becomes 
about as expensive as making new anything-else, and the argument for 
patents vanishes in pharmaceuticals as it does everywhere else.

The one that gets me, though, is copyright.

They claim that authors writing in England (which had copyright laws) 
made more money from American customers than from their native England. 
(And, at the time, America had no copyright laws.) I cannot wrap my mind 
around this. I am not saying it is untrue - but rather, that I cannot 
comprehend /how/ it can be true. If in America it costs nothing to copy 
an author's work, HOW ARE THEY MAKING MONEY??

Similarly, a later chapter comes tentatively close to saying "You don't 
need a multi-million dollar recording studio to make music any more. All 
you need is a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of other stuff." 
This is not true, of course. High quality microphones still cost a 
crapload of money. Sound-proofed rooms are still extremely expensive. 
Professional recording engineers aren't cheap. And so forth.

But really, if music did not have copyright, I'm pretty sure we would 
see an army of backroom musicians putting out some great stuff. I'm a 
little worried that, like YouTube, most of the cool stuff would be 
droned in an ocean of stupid musical burping and other nonsense. But 
there would be a lot more music out there. (I could show you some of the 
music *I* made, for example...)

What I really cannot figure out is this: It apparently cost $225,000,000 
to film Pirates of the Caribbean. It's not just that it has famous 
actors in it and there are some big explosions. If you watch the 
documentary DVD, you'll see that they took an entire container ship 
loaded to the max, sailed to a tiny tropical island, and terraformed 
half of it. Seriously. They built an entire town. They cut down jungle. 
They built new roads. They created whole buildings. They build brand new 
infrastructure that didn't exist there before. Just so they could film 
the few scenes in the movie that call for a jungle setting.

And you're seriously telling me that somebody is going to spend 
$225,000,000 of their own money, knowing that as soon as the first DVD 
is minted, the entire movie will be available globally for $0, and the 
studio will never make a single penny back? Like, seriously??

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> Similarly, a later chapter comes tentatively close to saying "You don't
> need a multi-million dollar recording studio to make music any more. All
> you need is a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of other stuff."
> This is not true, of course. High quality microphones still cost a
> crapload of money. Sound-proofed rooms are still extremely expensive.
> Professional recording engineers aren't cheap. And so forth.

Who said anything about high quality microphones or sound-proof rooms? 
Most music is done with synthetizers nowadays.  And in the event that 
they actually want a good mic, they can get them used for less than $100 
off e-Bay.

Professional recording engineers don't come beofre you get an actual 
record deal with a company.

Most people are do-it-yourselfers nowadays.  I know a few that actually 
made enough money by recording in their bedrooms that they are actually 
making a living out of it.

Back in the good old days, bands would sell "demo tapes" recorded in 
their garage or basement (hence the name "garage sound") at concerts, to 
help pay the bills and hoping that these would end up in some record 
industry's guy lap.  Now the quality of many of these demos is actually 
good enough that some simply skip the record company part and sell their 
own CDs.

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
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/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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> Similarly, a later chapter comes tentatively close to saying "You don't
> need a multi-million dollar recording studio to make music any more. All
> you need is a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of other stuff."
> This is not true, of course. High quality microphones still cost a
> crapload of money. Sound-proofed rooms are still extremely expensive.
> Professional recording engineers aren't cheap. And so forth.

But really, with a laptop and few hundred dollars 99% of people (who are 

systems) are not going to be able to tell the difference whether you 

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On 27/09/2012 08:34 AM, scott wrote:
>> Similarly, a later chapter comes tentatively close to saying "You don't
>> need a multi-million dollar recording studio to make music any more. All
>> you need is a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of other stuff."
>> This is not true, of course. High quality microphones still cost a
>> crapload of money. Sound-proofed rooms are still extremely expensive.
>> Professional recording engineers aren't cheap. And so forth.
>
> But really, with a laptop and few hundred dollars 99% of people (who are

> systems) are not going to be able to tell the difference whether you


You honestly believe that?


record something, it sounds like I'm sitting /inside/ a waterfall. 
There's just so much hiss!

(What is more perplexing, you would /think/ filtering out a constant set 
of frequencies would be pretty easy... but I've yet to find any software 
which can actually do it.)

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