Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 23:47:57 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, <cjclark@alum.mit.edu> Cc: "Salvo Bartolotta" <bartequi@neomedia.it>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de>, <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <007f01c15220$a92e4ee0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20011010233539.G83192@lpt.ens.fr>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Rahul Siddharthan [mailto:rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in] >Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 2:36 PM >To: cjclark@alum.mit.edu >Cc: Salvo Bartolotta; Ted Mittelstaedt; P. U. (Uli) Kruppa; >freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: Use of the UNIX Trademark > > >Crist J. Clark said on Oct 10, 2001 at 14:01:26: >> > programs in the field (or even in other fields)? >> >> It depends on the field. Allowing patents can cause a field to >> boom. If people believe they can make money off of a technology and >> that they will have patent protection for their discoveries, they may >> invest great amounts of money and resources into the field. > >This is a common claim. The trouble is it is hard to substantiate, or >test in a controlled way, and depends on too many assumptions (that >people will not do research except on money; people will not spend >money on expensive research except for tangible rewards; people will >not innovate unless they can control the use of their ideas; etc.) > The problem with BOTH of these paragraphs is that they are attempting to formulate a general hypothesis that's applicable across all types of industries and all types of inventors. The little guy in his garage making a new invention != the large corporate research team. Some problems can only be addressed by the large corporate teams and others can only be addressed by the little guy in his garage, still other problems can be addressed by both teams. You can certainly make a case that the little guy in his garage is as much interested in fame and fortune as he is in money - and in fact fame and fortune for him is often even more valuable and much easier for him to use to get money. (consulting fees, etc.) But I think also that you can equally make the case that the large research team MUST be well-funded, and in fact the areas that those teams are the most good are areas where just the raw materials for the experiments alone cost thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The patent system is really designed for the large research teams and corporations because they have the legal muscle to defend patent infringements whereas the small inventor usually can't. But of course, the small inventor often benefits from a patent infringement because the big company doing the infringing is just marketing the hell out of his device for him, and he can simply wait and if the invention becomes successful, then he can usually get a quiet out-of-court settlement or even get hired on by the big company. The big companies, on the other hand, definitely don't benefit from patent infringement of their patents. >> > It is about this point that I disagree. In general, IMO Science >should be >> > patent-free. >> >> That's just not a reasonable view of how the world works. For example, >> the entire field of medicine would come to an almost complete >> standstill without patents. HUGE amounts of money are spent developing >> drugs and devices to be patented. > >Reality check: Even *huger* amounts of money are being spent on legal >budgets to defend those patents. Most drug companies spend much more >on their legal fees than on research. I think this is a great simplification of the drug industries legal problems. Today, if someone takes a drug and gets an upset stomach as a side effect they are immediately on the phone with their lawyer suing for malpractice. Not only that but the drug industry has to spend a huge amount of money getting new products through the FDA approval process. Then to top it off the insurance companies are pressuring their customers to substitute Generic drugs for name brand drugs as much as possible. So you get a situation where the drug companies end up having 2 ways to make money. In one class are the companies that make their money by spending a lot of money on developing new drugs then patent them then burn up part of the patent time getting the thing past the approval processes, these folks have a narrow window in which to make money. In the other class are the companies that as soon as the patents expire they run out and manufacture other's drugs in mass quantities and undercut them. There is a reason that you can buy pharmaceuticals cheap in Mexico and carry them across the border and see the same drug selling for 10 times the amount. All of the retirees in San Diego make their trips to Tijuana every month to fill their prescriptions because of this. You don't have people filing multi-million dollar lawsuits in Mexico against the drug companies because the drug they bought made their piss turn green or something stupid like that. >Moreover, some of them classify >"marketing research" under "research". The majority of the drugs >being developed and patented are in fact of little interest to anyone; >then the drug companies get into the game of marketing their drugs, >and convincing you, the customer, that you actually need them. Hey, medicine is Big Business these days, and you can't trust your doctor anymore. This is old news, folks. If you get seriously sick then IMHO your a fool to swallow what your doctor says without question. One of the hottest and most growing fields of knowledge on the Internet today is medical information. There's no excuse for not being an informed consumer in this area. Today the Internet makes it rediculously easy to check up on what your doctor is diagnosing. In fact the newspapers are always printing stories of the parents with the kid with the mysterious malady that sees 10 doctors who don't know what's wrong who then key the symptoms into a search engine and within an hour have 3 possible diagnosis that they then yard off to the doctor for confirmation. The real problem is that this makes people squeamish - well wake up folks, there's a reason your teachers hit you in the head with an eraser to wake you up in Biology class. If you don't have any interest in understanding how your own body functions - well don't come crying to me about it. >Naturally, where the sufferers of the disease are mainly from poor >developing countries, there is not much interest in developing drugs >for them. > Um - most of those "poor developing countries" have a tremendous and critical overpopulation problem. A quarter of them are Catholic and we have a Pope that tells people the Pill is bad, well what the heck do you expect? Those countries can't get population control going the civilized way, so they do it the way the animals do it - they breed like rabbits and let disease and famine and war kill off the population periodically. It's sickening, but your barking up the wrong tree to blame the drug companies about it. Check into it and you will find that in these developing countries that 200 years ago, they didn't have these problems. They also didn't have a tenth of the population they do today. Well, when you overpopulate then you use up your food and what food people can get is piss-poor nutritionally, and when you have people that are undernourished then they have little natural resistance to disease. Instead of throwing medicine at the problem, they need to be handing out birth control pills for free. Hell, tomorrow if the Pope were to announce that the Pill was required of all good Catholics then you would make one of the single most important steps to getting the population under control. Making HIV drugs available for free is just putting salve on the symptoms it does nothing to address the underlying problems that create the condition to start with. >The biggest medical breakthrough in the 20th century was undoubtedly >Fleming's discovery of antibiotics. This had nothing to do with >patent protection. Nor did Barnard's development of open-heart >surgery, or any other major medical advance I can think of, in fact. >There is a good case for arguing that patent restrictions *throttle* >good research, by making research into improvement of an AIDS drug, >for instance, too expensive to be affordable to anyone but a very >well-funded multinational. > Today, just about all major medical problems have already had a fair bit of research pumped into them. The easy solutions have mostly been discovered already. What remains to be done is the harder and more expensive work. There's not an unlimited amount of medical research dollars to go around, and even if there were, there's not an unlimited number of medical researchers. Furthermore, in many people's minds there's some serious questions to be raised by dumping a lot of funding into solving diseases like lung cancer, heart disease, AIDS, and things like that. With those three diseases, there's already solutions - quit smoking, quit overeating fatty junk foods, and quit abusing drugs and sharing needles and having casual sex with prostitutes and anyone else that comes swimming by. And above all, get off your ass and start exercising. >For some unflattering comments on the pharmaceutical industry, see >http://www.mercola.com/2000/june/24/pharmaceutical_industry.htm > I wouldn't shed any tears over the "poor elderly" here. In the US due to the baby boom, in the next 20 years the elderly are going to wield enormous political power. We are already starting to see the results of this, but what's going to happen in the future will make the flap over the "stealing from the social security pot" look like a sandbox fight. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >And of course, there was the recent mess about cheap AIDS drugs in >Brazil and South Africa. Personally, I think the pharmaceutical >industry (in which I also include genetic patents) is the second-worst >possible advertisement for patents (software being first). > > >> Again, drug companies and other >> research groups freely publish their results in the very rich medical >> literature due to the fact that they have patents on the >> technologies. If they didn't have patents, they wouldn't publish the >> information. > >The "other research groups" most certainly would, as they have been >doing throughout. I don't think you understand what drives research. > > >> > > (Not to say that some people haven't pulled some things off with the >> > > Patent Office. One of the jokes about a former employer of mine was >> > > that the company had a patent on least-squares regression. It really >> > > did.) >> > >> > Urk. >> >> The patent was for applying least-squares regression to a certain >> specific type of data in a specific way. It is unlikely it would have >> stood up to scrutiny, and I think it's expired by now. > >One of the Ig Nobel prizes this year went jointly to someone in >Australia who patented the wheel, and to the patent office which >granted the patent. > >> But you agree there needs to be protection. If you have a better way, >> offer it up. I don't think that the patent system is perfect or that >> it is not frequently abused[0]. I do believe patents are the best fit >> we have right now for protecting the IP inherent in computer programs. > >It seems to me there is even less justification for patenting computer >algorithms on economic grounds, than for patenting pharmaceutical >products. To develop and test a new drug, you do need funding; to >develop a new algorithm, you certainly don't, other than your salary. >People will continue to develop such algorithms anyway, as they always >have, without patent protection. > >It reminds me of a passage in Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright" >(highly recommended reading) where she compares the content industry's >insistence on stringent copyright protection with the arguments: >Supposing food were not copyrightable, then your elite cordon bleu >restaurant could instantly have its recipes ripped off by the cheap >takeaway down the street. They couldn't differentiate their products; >There would be no incentive; eventually we'd all be reduced to eating >Uncle Ben's. Or suppose clothing styles were not protected by >copyright: then Versace and Armani could be ripped off by any >smalltime tailor, and the fashion industry would be killed by cheap >knockoffs. Of course, food recipes and clothing designs are >protected by copyright, and never have been. > >(But I very much fear they will be. That, or patents.) > >R > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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