Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 09:58:45 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: cjclark@alum.mit.edu, 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: <20011011095845.B475@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <007f01c15220$a92e4ee0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 11:47:57PM -0700 References: <20011010233539.G83192@lpt.ens.fr> <007f01c15220$a92e4ee0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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Ted Mittelstaedt said on Oct 10, 2001 at 23:47:57: > 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. This happens fairly rarely. First, the small company should have the resources for legal proceedings against the big company. These days, whoever hires the bigger lawyer wins. Second, even when the small company does do this, the "innovation" is considered pretty standard by that time, so the sudden patent claims are not looked on very kindly. > The big companies, on the other hand, definitely don't benefit from > patent infringement of their patents. Isn't Unisys a "big company"? It was at one time, anyway. I'm sure there are plenty of lesser-known cases, but I haven't really followed 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. Hmm, well I hadn't thought of that. That's a uniquely American problem. > 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. On the other hand, self medication can be extremely dangerous. I'm not a doctor, but I know plenty of doctors very well, and one of the major problems they have is persuading patients that there's nothing wrong with them (beyond perhaps bad food habits and lack of exercise, or something like that). The patients insist on medication (particularly if they're not highly educated) so the doctors end up prescribing harmless placebos or vitamin B. But if you encourage patients to start off making self-diagnoses: for every one case where they're right, there will be 20 where they're hopelessly self-deluded, and be a nuisance to both the doctor and the pharmacist. Luckily pharmacies don't sell without prescriptions, but if the patient hops from doctor to doctor until getting a prescription he/she likes (and this is not difficult), there's not much that the pharmacy can do. You may think this is a necessary consequence of medicine being big business, but I think it's a Bad Thing. There's a reason why medical school takes 5 years or more. > there's a reason your teachers hit you in the head with an eraser to wake > you up in Biology class. Biology class is totally different from medical school. Most of us did not go to medical school. > >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. This is a stupid statement. Yes, overpopulation is bad, but the diseases existed much before the overpopulation (in fact the overpopulation is largely *because* of more effective control of the less dangerous diseases, which has increased lifetimes). Overpopulation also has little to do with the pill, and more to do with the fact that in a poor family, children are cheap labour and hence regarded as valuable assets; especially sons. > 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. Oh, yes, they did. And so did the western world. Check on the plague in England, for example; but 100 years ago people were even dying of influenza in the west. Today, we have an array of cancer treatments which are still of no help if you were diagnosed just a bit too late. We still don't have anything for malaria beyond quinine, let alone some of the more obscure African diseases like ebola. > >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. Everything looks easy after someone's done it. Future breakthroughs will not come from refining the existing drugs and antibiotics, but from some totally new approach like designing proteins/enzymes for specific tasks, genetics, or something nobody has thought of. Such work goes on mainly in universities, not in the pharmaceutical laboratories. > 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. Well, cancer can have many causes. Even lung cancer: it can come from polluted city air. You can't ask everyone to go live in the mountains. Or it can come for reasons unknown. Heart disease can be hereditary. AIDS is preventable, certainly, but we already have too many cases to ignore it. Funds are needed for medical research, but a new framework is needed where those funds are used correctly, not on pandering to the phobias of the rich while squeezing the poor. Medicine should be part of the infrastructure of "public good", like railways and post which have never been successfully privatised. Instead, we today have instances of multinationals trying to grab patents on the healing properties of things like turmeric, which have been known for centuries among traditional communities. Then the countries most affected by this have to go through expensive and time-consuming litigation to try and overthrow the patent. Patents were meant for the public good, not for the benefit of the multinationals or even the inventors individually; this system falls far short. R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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