Patenting for society
In a number of European countries we have so-called pirate parties elected into the countries’ and continent’s parlements. The pirate party movement was born due to a frustration of many – especially younger people – with the outdated legal framework for intellectual property. Most people will directly think about music piracy or illegal downloading of music. However, the implications of the intellectual property laws are beyond just music and are becoming a serious problem for important aspects in society such as: health.
Often the pharmaceutical industry is criticized for asking a fair amount of money for the products that they are selling to society: medications. Fact is that many so-called blockbuster products need to compensate for basic research or products that never yield anything. Thus, the compensation that the pharmaceutical industry receives for their products might actually be a just fair return; when you look at the entire portfolio.
One of the areas where they ceased development of new drugs is anti biotics. This is due to become a serious problem for society at large. Anti biotics are widely used in the healthcare system and more and more people become resistant to the existing cures, all with the consequence that we soon run out of antibiotics that do not work anymore!
Developing new antibiotics takes a lot of effort and has a high degree of failure and therefore is not considered to be a value adding activity by many pharmaceutical companies. The main reason why this is not value adding is because the companies have too little time to generate money from the invested capital before the patent expires and price drops due to entrance of copy-cat generic companies. Fortunately, this can be changed by reforming the intellectual property laws. The reformed intellectual property laws should differentiate in durations for patents so that they can be used as to provide the necessary incentives to innovators again. Aspects that should be considered in defining patent durations are things like:
- General payback time in the industry the patents is filed for. For example, there is a huge difference between technological developments in pharmaceuticals in contrast to developments in information technology.
- What incentive for innovation is needed in a particular industry.
