It has interviews with the patent holder, and it's amazing to hear his perspective. (Which I do not agree with.)
412 - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/23/163480928/episode-...
551 - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/07/09/329895088/episode-...
Side topic, but I really wish Planet Money would look into medical re-patenting. Growing up I needed albuterol inhalers occasionally and I remember them costing less than $10, but recently my kid needed one and it was $60 with copay (over $100 without insurance). That's when I found this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/the-soaring-cost-of-a-s...
TL;DR - Inhalers use CFC's (ozone hole making), but scientists and environmentalists recommended an exception for them when banning CFC's because the amounts were so tiny and the medical benefits so huge. The pharmaceutical industry decided to lobby against the exception so they could reformulate the inhaler and introduce a new patent - and make billions on a 30+ year old drug.
Its unreasonable to expect a publicly traded company to do anything other than chase profits the best way they can.
Best chair name ever.
"The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful," said Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. "Silly patent lawsuits force prices to go up while competition and innovation suffer. That's bad for consumers and bad for business. It's time to fix our broken system, and EFF can help. So that's why part of my donation funds a new title for EFF Staff Attorney Julie Samuels: 'The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents'."
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-patent-project-gets-h...
This raises so many opportunities!
Patents are absolutely fundamental to the way medical research works today, especially the search for new treatments and medicines. That’s a tricky thing to mess around with. There are obvious problems. There are speculations about what fixing them could yield on one hand. In the other hand is a massive industry producing a lot of technology, science and actual treatments for diseases.
What seems (to me) to be missing in these debates is some humility about knowing the answers. While our culture is speeding through “movements” at a higher rate than ever before, we still tend to approach these big political/philosophical/economic issues with an early modern/modernist perspective. Our most popular philosophers for these matters are old dead guys who liked to think of big organic things like society and civilization in terms of how we should set things up if we had snapped into existence today, a clean slate. That’s a fairly pompous perspective.
In any case, I think the patents and intellectual property problem is a very tricky one to solve. Experiment with possible solutions is almost impossible. IP legally mimics regular property in a metaphor-like way. That metaphor is proving increasingly inaccurate. At the same time, we have huge pieces of our economy and whatnot built on it. At the same time our legal systems are showing signs that they might need a reimagining. Many of our legal constructs such as ‘legal entity’ or ‘jurisdiction’ are being pushed to extremes, and metaphors eventually break. Does the concept of a company legally approximating a person hold up when we have impenetrable layers of ownership across jurisdictions? Does the metaphor fray?
Patents are essential to the current business model of pharmaceutical companies -- they are necessary to guarantee a return on investment, but the portion of the investment devoted to R&D and clinical trials is dwarfed by the marketing.
If you look at the big companies you can divide their budget into 4 big
categories. One is R&D, one is marketing and administration; the
other is profits, and the other is just the cost of making the pills and
putting them in the bottles and distributing them. The smallest of
those is R&D. The smallest is Research and development. Profits
usually are about the same. Marketing and Administration is
more than twice as much.
That doesn't mean that there aren't gains to be had from a moderate version of that approach. I just don't think there is a theoretical framework capable of telling us the right answer in economics. Economics is at its best more similar to zoology than physics. Zoology will not accurately predict the way species and populations will react to a reduction in available water sources or the introduction of new species. On the rare occasions that it's feasible, repeating the experiment will rarely yield the same result.
> Patents are essential to the current business model of pharmaceutical companies -- they are necessary to guarantee a return on investment, but the portion of the investment devoted to R&D and clinical trials is dwarfed by the marketing.
Your comment contradicts itself.
If, as you say, patents are "necessary to guarantee a return on investment", then it doesn't matter if the R&D is the largest cost or not, because the company won't produce a profit (and therefore won't produce new drugs) without the patent.
In fact, it's quite reasonable to think that both massive marketing and time-limited protection from competition are necessary to ensure enough of a return to guarantee continued investment into the industry. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
I would agree on that had we not recently had a massive change away from products and property and into service and contracts. Citizens do not own cars, coffee machines, or books. They house devices which they have a licensed permission to use, and it is contract law that rules and not property law.
Patents could also easily be redefined as a contract between state and inventor, where inventor provide knowledge in return for privilege and protection. It doesn't change anything for the economy, but it would remove the need to talk about property and it would imply that the contract could be changed in the future.
Edit : Here's a description of the issue, which is a bit different than my recollection
Interesting. That particular patent was owned by Hughes Electronics, though, not Boeing [1]. EDIT: Apparently in 2000 Boeing acquired that division of Hughes Electronics [2] but the transfer of ownership of the patent was never recorded in the USPTO.
The patent expired in 2012 because the owner didn't pay the required "maintenance fee," which is a statutory fee that must be paid every few years to keep a patent alive [3]; see the end of the document to which you linked.
[1] http://assignment.uspto.gov/#/search?adv=patNum%3A6116545&so...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Aircraft_Company#Hughes_...
[3] http://www.uspto.gov/patents-maintaining-patent/maintain-you...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Belbruno
Belbruno has been an innovative researcher otherwise, but it's hardly an excuse to monopolize math theorems or their computational applications.
It's unfortunate that the Patent Office can't ban trolls who have abused the system.
I agree with you on one hand but on the other is it impossible for a person to reform and later want a patent to protect their new creation? I'd just like to see the whole system overhauled or maybe even removed in some ways.
Help make a difference!
Or, even worse, do license agreements typically include language that says the licensee agrees to continue to pay royalties even if the patent is later found to be invalid? I can see someone being strong armed into signing an agreement like that.
Apparently at some point an American producer licensed the patent for a mouthwash for a percentage of sale – I think it was Listerine, but can't find this story on Wikipedia right now. A decade or two later, the patent ran out. Anybody could now copy the formula without royalties. Except: the original licensor sued his american licensee for continued royalty payments. They won, because the initial contract never specified an end to the arrangement when the patent expired.
Source: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/17...
This doctrine is being challenged at the Supreme Court currently, in Kimble v. Marvel:
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kimble-v-marvel-e...
To your other question, though, no, a license that tried to force continued payments despite invalidation would be very atypical. In fact, to do so is currently per se unenforceable. (Note, though, that the Supreme Court might allow for some gray area in this rule in the coming months).
Software is a different beast, simply because the vagueness you can express in a software patent can be so general that it covers use cases almost retroactively.
Software patents should be extremely specific, regular patents work for the most part.
The current system is in everyone's worst interest. Getting there first shouldn't be worth as much as being able to provide an excellent quality of product or service - software or otherwise. You certainly shouldn't be able to hold up all of humanity's progress for the entire future because you can claim priority.
I mean, if I could, I can think of a few I'd go after before finishing this very sentence. Unfortunately, it turns out, I don't have that authority.