[einpoklum]

> Then came the Covid pandemic and “climate emergency”. What had been a friendly, ideological tussle about the digital rights of scientists versus profiteers took on a new tone. To call it “civil disobedience” would be to miss the point. Universities simply stopped playing the game – and the more progressive governments followed suit by deeming the enforcement of academic publishers’ copyright no longer in the public interest.

So, this didn't happen - and IIANM, there wasn't even a copyright/patent moratorium on vaccine-related IP, right? I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?

[zozbot234]

Companies like Moderna did dispense with IP restrictions around the vaccine, but it turns out that this was never a binding constraint in the first place. These vaccines must essentially be brewed via a biological process, not merely synthesized in a chemical lab like most pharmaceuticals. There's probably a whole lot of fuzzy know-how in this that's inherently hard to replicate, no matter what the legal environment is like.

[j33zusjuice]

I don’t think anything happened at a governmental level, but I know some companies open sourced select patents to help with the pandemic. I vaguely remember an issue with 3D printing ventilator parts because it violated the patent [1], but I don’t think that company ever actually sued anyone, they just threatened it.

1. https://www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/248121/20200317/maker...

[api]

Reminds me of very small integrated circuit process nodes where the manufacturing process itself is so rife with trade secrets and "art not science" that it's hard to duplicate even without IP restrictions.

[thfuran]

Aren't mRNA vaccines quite straightforward to manufacture?

[marcosdumay]

They are incredibly hard to manufacture. They are just all manufacture the same way with the same equipment, so if you can do one, you can do any.

[naasking]

> I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?

Bill Gates convinced them not to free up the IP. No joke.

[akiselev]

Well of course, biocompatible 5G chips are no joke! They'd be crazy to give that kind of IP away.