|
|
|
| Authored by: albert on Friday, June 14 2013 @ 04:39 PM EDT |
is "...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for
limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective
writings and discoveries...".
It's not to create incentives for businesses. If biotech companies have a
problem with this, they can write their Congress folk, or find something else to
do.
The over-monetization of everything is the main problem we're having now.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in health care costs in the US. Let's support
university research instead. It's cheaper and more effective anyway.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: webster on Friday, June 14 2013 @ 04:47 PM EDT |
.
1. =========="So the question I have for the lawyers is:
is there a way to protect the research investment of
identifying the ASSOCIATION between a particular gene and a
disease?"==========
They could discover the association and keep it as a trade
secret. It would be "Pay or maybe Die" for those who felt
at risk. This is actually the way it was for Myriad with a
patent. No second opinions. Having a trade secret is like
having a patent monopoly.
2.=========="Would this be an 'application of knowledge'
that would be entitled to patent or copyright or some other
form of legal protection?"==========
Patent? The Supremes just said no. They can easily get a
copyright on their treatise explaining the phenomena but
they would prefer to keep it a secret.
For many the "research investment" is the love of science
and or humanity. It has never needed protection. Some with
power, though, would control and exploit it with lobbyists
and lawyers.
.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 14 2013 @ 05:20 PM EDT |
I'm not a Lawyer, so your questions aren't directed at me.
is
there a way to protect the research investment
Not via Patent Law!
In no section does Patent Law promise to protect any investment.
There is
absolutely no mention about money in any form:
Whoever invents or
discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of
matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor,
subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
As a
result - when discussing whether something is patent eligible or not - money is
a factor that only creates confusion as it has no role to play in whether
something is patent eligible.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: tknarr on Friday, June 14 2013 @ 08:37 PM EDT |
Perhaps the problem here is laziness?
We used to separate pure
research (figuring out what genes do what) from applied research (figuring out
better/faster/cheaper ways to test for the presence or absence of genes). Maybe
the problem here is that the companies don't want to go to the effort of
figuring out a better/faster/cheaper way to test for the genes. Once they've
done the pure research and figured out the gene, they'd rather skip all the hard
work and just patent checking for that gene. It won't matter if their test isn't
the best if they're the only ones who can get paid for it.
It may be
simple to do the basic test, but it's also probably not the only way to do it.
We call it the naive solution. In sorting, for instance, the naive solution is
to scan all the items until you find the largest, append it to the result list,
lather rinse repeat until you have no more items to scan through. It's
guaranteed to work, it's dead simple to code, and it's performance is utterly
hideously bad as the number of items increases. The interesting work isn't in
the idea of sorting, it's in better, faster and cheaper algorithms like
Quicksort or Heapsort or insertion sort or merge sort that do the same job as
the naive method but do it better. So why are these companies not taking what
they know of the genes and coming up with almost-surely-patentable better
methods for doing that amplifying and sequencing? And what's funny is that if
they did, those methods would almost certainly be applicable to more than just
this one gene. By doing that work they could get in on tests for almost any
gene. But of course it's more work that way too. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 15 2013 @ 12:20 AM EDT |
There is no way to monetize the correlation between a risk factor and a disease.
You can, however, monetize developing something that fixes the problem.
Bob Heinlein speculated that pure research always pays off, but he based that on
serendipity. I tend to agree with his assessment.
In the case you stipulate, finding the link is the easy part of the problem.
IANAL
-- Alma[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 15 2013 @ 02:31 AM EDT |
We continually have fund raisers for cancer research in this country where
millions upon millions of dollars are gifted by the public. We also have a
government that in some instances match public donations $ for $. Then added to
this there is research and development grants that can attract 1.5 or more $'s
for each dollar spent in research as a deduction.
So for each given research lab, i wonder what ration of public monies (either
directly of via government funds or tax concessions) verses private investment
funds are spent and what returns are made to the public verses private
investors? Me thinks the ration is rather high in favor of the public so it's
immoral in my view to see the price of these drugs being so high that again
public funds must be used to subsidize their costs.
I'd like to see a drug/research economic cost benefit analysis just like the
recent patent cost benefit analysis to see whether the public is getting a just
return on it's investment via donations, either directly or via the other
mentioned methods.
I fear that the private investment side gets an unwarranted return and that when
some drug is developed, these multinationals are great at having entities in low
tax jurisdictions and use very Apple'esque methods to avoid tax liability
(depriving a country and it's people of a return on their investment).
It's always easy for accounting to show an untrue picture and at one tech
company i worked at, they built a 6 story building used for R&D so paid for
by taxpayers (@ x2 build cost) yet this company used transfer pricing and low
tax jurisdictions to funnel monies out of the country while showing little
profit and paying little tax. They then sold the building years later and i
fully expect they gobbled up those profits in a similar way. I'm sure drug
companies do the same if not worse...
Greed should not be confused with peoples desire to discover things or to work
as a researcher because a close family member dies when they were young and gave
them an itch to scratch so to say..
And we all have heard that some who want to develop a product will do so without
considering patents, though some who want to develop a product may not do so
because of a fear of being sued by a patent holder..[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
