Re: [Patents] Article Defending Bayh-Dole

[Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr>]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 07:08:01PM +0200, Hartmut Pilch wrote:
> This seems to be the core piece of the article which needs to be
> scrutinised.  I'd suspect that it is a historic myth, but where's the
> evidence?
> 
> > For 30 years after World War II, the United States had precisely the
> > policy of nonexclusive licensing of federally funded inventions that
> > Shulman advocates. The government owned the patents and would license
> > them only on a nonexclusive basis. Under this system, no drug that the
> > government owned rights to was ever developed and became available to
> > the public.
> 
> This insinuates that drugs will only be commercialised if someone owns
> exclusive rights.  I.e. once patents expire nobody will produce the drug
> anymore because there is no sufficient margin.  Thus generic drugs don't
> exist or are in short supply.  Is that true?

If I understand correctly, a new drug has to be tested before being
sold, and the testing is very expensive.  I think that generics may no
longer need to be tested (since they were before they became generics).
So that would make a difference.

  But of course this difference is based on investment cost (after the
invention is produced) and on distribution costs.  Hence it does not
apply to software.


   I do not know whether patents are good or bad in biotechs.  What I
do know is that relevant parameters vary with every area, and may even
change over time.  So the one size fits all policies of dumb lawyers /
politicians / ideologists / netbots is just as much nonsense.


Bernard

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