[geeks] Drug prices [was Re: nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro]

[der Mouse]

> [M]ost countries (I believe - I'm leaving wiggle-room here...) honor
> each other's patents and intellectual property rights.

For copyright, I don't think they do, per se, honour one another's
copyrights.  But there are a few very widespread copyright conventions
to which most countries of the world are signatories; this means that
in practice it seems like it, because (for example) Sweden's idea of
when something is copyrighted, and what copyright permits and when, is
usually fairly close to (say) Germany's.

Patents are another story.  I know of no country that honours any
other's patents, per se.  I think the European Union has created
EU-wide patents.  I've seen it said that there is something called an
international patent which is supposed to be valid in most of the
world; I have also seen it said that that thing is actually just a
framework for making it easier to secure individual patents in the
affected countries.  I've never looked into it in enough detail to know
which is closer to the truth.

Other forms of intellectual property...the only one I can think of
offhand that's widespread enought o matter is trade secret, and my
impression is that that's much more catch-as-catch-can than either
patents or copyrights.

Not that I'm an intellectual property laywer, of course.

>> On the third hand, it could hardly happen to a nicer victim.
> If you starve a Pharma of cash, you stifle innovation and you reduce
> the number of new companies that enter the market (why go into Pharma
> if your work product will be stolen?).

I've seen that said often enough.  I'm not really convinced it's true
(though I'm not convinced it's not, either), but to the extent that it
is true it's true only if you restrict drug research and innovation to
more or less the current USA scheme.  One model that strikes me as at
least plausible is to nationalize drug research and development, to pay
for it with tax dollars and not restrict the results with anything like
patents.  The anti-socialism crowd would scream, of course, if such a
thing were to be tried in (eg) the USA, but somewhere more heavily
socialized might find something of the sort appropriate.  (I don't know
whether anyone has tried it; I can't recall hearing of any.)

It does strike me as a case where the benefit to society as a whole
might prove to be worth the inevitable losses from getting government
fairly directly involved, especially as compared to the problems caused
by a purer capitalist system such as the current USA one.  (Naturally,
different people will have different opinions of the relative values of
the benefits and costs....)

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