Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch

veeesix@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• el_muerte@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “Noooo, not like that!”

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• conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system; if someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.

  Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.

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  • libra00@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I see the point you’re aiming at, but it’s not little companies discovering new drugs it’s giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then ‘swoop in’ to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.

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    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You might be surprised how small medical research labs can be. The lady responsible for nanolipid particles used in transporting rNA vaccines, in similar fashion to how an organelle gets packaged in membrane and cast out, spent decades cruising on bare minimum public funding.

      What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.

      Although tbh I don’t expect the USA to be upholding strict drug safety standards in the near future.

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      • tauren@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.

        Thank you. These arguments are always hard to read. Sure, small labs are where it usually starts, but without enormous and risky investments, we would never have the drugs we have today. Most of these investments fail miserably, so one successful drug must cover the costs of ten unsuccessful ones. Nobody would do that if their IP weren’t protected. It’s more about reputation than facts when it comes to this topic.

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      • libra00@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I was speaking generally and obviously there are exceptions and contributions from all over the place. But it’s not tiny labs like that that hold a death-grip on the patents to drugs that are being sold for absurd amounts of money that are far out of reach of the people who need them. Also while I recognize that this kind of research is expensive it must also be recognized that much of that research is funded, directly or indirectly, by the US government through the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, etc, so the fact that these big corporations are effectively getting a hand-out and then charging an arm and a leg for it sticks in my craw. But then maybe I’m just weird for thinking that human life is more important than quarterly profits.

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  • zeezee@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know

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    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.

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    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.

      And even if they did, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.

      We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.

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      • Auntievenim@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.

        I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.

        I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.

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  • phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.

    Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don’t directly make money but are good for humanity.

    You don’t like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars

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    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You’re right.

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  • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.

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    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes, 100%.

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  • Avatar_of_Self@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spend $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.

    It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.

    pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/

    Or

    jamanetwork.com/journals/…/2804378

    I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.

    Why should companies own the whole IP?

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    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      This is a great point. I know that some pharmas actually do internally funded research, it’s a thing, it happens, but it’s completely dwarfed by shareholder giveaways and government subsidies ofc.

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• ScrambledEggs@lazysoci.al ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.

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