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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 14 2013 @ 02:42 AM EDT |
This would work just as well as 'sell your program, but keep
your code a secret'.
Ie, not at all: any interested competitor can take your drug
home and reverse engineer the formula.
Pharmaceutical development is a lot different to software
development. Software you can just say 'hmm, you know what
would be a neat idea? slide to unlock' - and in the process
of conceptualizing the problem you essentially have
'invented' the solution.
If thinking really hard for a few hours was sufficient to
develop a drug which cures cancer, then we could live in a
much happier patent-free world. Unfortunately it doesn't
work like that, and even once you've gone through hundreds
of potential solutions and thousands of mice to test them
on, you still have a 3-4 year process of testing on people
*after* you've disclosed it to the public.
If you limit the money a pharma company can take in from the
sale of a drug (by giving some definition of 'reasonable'
costs or 'reasonable' markup) you effectively kill the
company by giving it a maximum level of profitability.
Perhaps you could force some kind of FRAND agreement on
them, or simply have the government buy up the pharma
companies and have all drug development done in state-owned
research labs. That would be better than killing drug
patents.
There are problems with the system, but removing patents
from pharma companies without doing anything else is not
going to solve anything. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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