[zanny]

Can you give an example of a patent being helpful in producing innovation and prosperity in the last 20 years?

IE, a patent that was an original idea, someone else tried to duplicate in a blatantly rip-off way before the patent expired, and the ensuing lawsuit lets the patent creator (who has their patent to-market in a useful state) take the copycat off the market?

[freyr]

You're assuming that patents promote innovation once they're defended in court.

Another argument would be that they promote innovation by (1) preventing blatant rip offs in the first place, (2) incentivizing individual inventors who invest their time and money with the assurance that their efforts won't be blatantly ripped off in the end by someone with more resources.

There are countless examples of truly innovative patents filed by individuals who devoted their lives to creating new things. Some of the inventors profited directly from their patents, others spent their life savings in court trying to defend their patents.

There are also countless patents for idiotic ideas, and countless idiotic patents that shouldn't have been filed in the first place. But saying all patents are bad might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[DevX101]

The pharmaceutical and biotech industry would be almost non-existent without intellectual property protection.

[busyant]

Absolutely correct. I used to work in this industry, and one of the 1st questions asked when we were thinking about testing a drug to treat a disease was "Does someone else 'own' this drug or do we?"

If someone else 'owned' the drug, then there was no point in pursuing it because the true "owner" would crush us if the drug ultimately proved useful in treating disease.

Interestingly, the people writing the drug patents use the same types of techniques mentioned by Joel...especially making claims as broad as possible.

The chemists that I worked with considered it an art form to be able to make broad claims that did not intersect with those of competing pharma companies.

There's a lot of bullshit that can go on w/ pharma patents, too, but the VCs would never fund a biotech startup if we couldn't defend "our" drugs.

[ESRogs]

While I'm sure a case could be made that IP protection is necessary in biotech, isn't the example you gave actually evidence of the the opposite -- that patents stifle innovation and research?

[busyant]

It depends on what you want to get out of the pharmaceutical industry.

I think it's the opposite. Since it costs so much $ to fund clinical trials and apply for regulatory approval, the lack of patents would stifle innovation because the pharma company that discovered the drug wouldn't be able to recoup their development costs if other companies were waiting in the wings, ready to sell a generic version of the same drug.

If development costs (especially regulatory approval costs) go down significantly, then I think you can argue that drug patents are an unnecessary evil. But if things stay as they are, then they are a necessary evil.

[bandushrew]

doesn't that mean that if nobody owned the drug, drug companies would be free to work on a wider range of research?

[freyr]

I think the idea is that then they couldn't charge exorbitant prices to recoup their investment costs. Drugs cost an enormous amount of money to develop.

[busyant]

Put yourself in their shoes. It's going to cost you $50MM-500MM just to test if a drug is effective and safe for treating a disease.

You sink all of that money in, with the hopes that your drug gets approved. And then, once you've done the heavy lifting, every generic manufacturer can come along and sell the drug because you don't have it patented?

No rational person/company will do that.

[zanny]

You must consider though how the massive test run costs associated only exist because the FDA believed drug companies could foot the bill since they got monopoly distribution.

In a patent-free world, those regulations wouldn't hold weight. What would happen (I imagine) is independently sponsored r&d produces drugs for trial that the FDA itself puts through clinical trials on taxpayer money. You can't sell a drug without FDA approval still, but since drug companies aren't operating as super-for-profit businesses on chemical compounds to help people live, they would foot the bill to make sure its safe.

[busyant]

Your scenario would be a helluva shakeup on how things are done now.

It would be interesting to see if your scenario would end up doing a better or worse job with respect to drug development.

[freyr]

> Interestingly, the people writing the drug patents use the same types of techniques mentioned by Joel...especially making claims as broad as possible.

Systems (legal, computer, etc.) need to be developed with the full expectation that people will do everything in their power to exploit them.

[mdkess]

For pharma patents - is there a requirement of trying to bring a patented chemical to market (at the very least, doing clinical trials, etc)?

[zanny]

I don't necessarily call that a good thing. It isn't a black and white pro that a business gets monopoly rights to distribute new drugs for 2 decades, even if most new drug research is funded for that profit.