God Fearing Atheist

I can own X, Y and Z, but how is it that i can own the fact, the *law of nature*, that says X + Y = Z?

This is all intellectual property amounts to: claims to certain natural laws. Could Newton haved patented universal gravitation?

sansha

Australia Aborigines currently have a writ before the High Court asserting copyright over the native animals. They are suing Qantas over their use of the kangaroo.

Makes no sense to me.

David Gould

They are not asserting copyright over the animals: they are asserting copyright over the use of the animals as symbols.

I suspect that their argument will fail because copyright in the instance of trademarks and symbols looks at specific arrangments of things and not generalities (eg, I can use the peace symbol in my logo and you can use it in yours but if you copy the way I use it then you breach my copyright).

pug846

GFA, would you spend millions of dollars and thousands of man hours attempting to make something if you knew once you made it, you wouldn't have the right to use it exclusively? Why would a drug company try and find the cure for a disease if they thought all the money they put into finding the cure would be wasted once the cure was found and they couldn't re-coup their losses.

excreationist

Here's an essay by the co-founder and vice-chair of EFF (Electronic Frontiers Foundation). He also is/was a lyricist for the "Grateful Dead".

<a href="http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop/barlow-economy-of-ideas.html" target="_blank">The Economy of Ideas - A framework for rethinking patents and copyrights in the Digital Age</a> by John Perry Barlow.

I think he explains fairly well how creative people could continue to make money without copyright. It would mean first-class culture for everyone, not just for the rich or those who get illegal copies of things. At the moment the corporations hoard the information and pay a bit to the artists and try and get the public to pay as much as possible. Without copyrights the public pays slightly above the manufacturing cost and there wouldn't be monopolies on products (e.g. star trek merchandise) so there would be competition.

As far as drug research goes, drug companies just do it because they expect huge returns on their investments. So they end up taking more out of society (money wise) than what they invested. If there were no drug patents and governments did the research then companies would be able to complete with each other making identical drugs. So you'd have competition - i.e. no more high priced drugs.
In Brazil they don't respect drug patents and are able to make expensive drugs such as AIDS drugs cheaply. So it seems that the drug company who invented it was just making the prices really high since it had a monopoly on that drug. The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation/UN) doesn't like that though.
Just wondering - how much does it cost to develop drugs anyway? I think Universities do most of the ground research then the drug companies just pay some individual researchers a lot of money to help. So the winners are the drug companies (who get the big profits) and the researchers. The public gets the drugs in the end, but they are really, really expensive. (Whatever the market will pay - if there are no alternatives, like in the AID's area, the profits could be huge)

"GFA, would you spend millions of dollars and thousands of man hours attempting to make something if you knew once you made it, you wouldn't have the right to use it exclusively?"

It could be a joint initiative, like MPEG and DVD... this gives the companies involved the information first so they can be the first to market. Having a reputation for leading edge products could help you recoup your costs after a while.

"Why would a drug company try and find the cure for a disease if they thought all the money they put into finding the cure would be wasted once the cure was found and they couldn't re-coup their losses."
Well government can give grants for research. The research could be shared all around the world (like it usually is in Universities). Everyone could benefit from it, instead of just the people who "own" the information. This would be an excellent way of helping third world countries since they could make their own AIDS medicines relatively cheaply, and legally too.

BTW, does anyone have information about how much drug companies have spent developing individual drugs and also how much the government has spent on individual drugs? This should be from a fairly objective source, not from a drug company.

I suspect that drug companies concentrate a lot on cosmetic and diet related drugs/cremes. This is because rich people would want to buy them. They'd basically concentrate on things that they could make a lot of money on - things that middle-class and upper-class people would want. They mightn't bother researching things that only poor people get like leprosy or rabies or something. And how come there are so many charities that have ads that are asking for donations for leukeimia, cancer, multiple-scerosis (MS) research, etc? Why aren't the drug companies investing into that research? Maybe they don't think they'd be able to make enough profits.... or maybe they think that it won't lead to anything they could just patent and "own" making a monopoly on it so that they can have huge mark-ups and make lots of money.

[ February 04, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>

Vorkosigan

This has veered in politics, I think, so I have moved it there.

Michael