[777] in libertarians
Re: Intellectual property rights
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin THEOBALD)
Mon Feb 27 17:00:02 1995
From: theobald@duke.cs.mcgill.ca (Kevin THEOBALD)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 16:57:04 -0500
In-Reply-To: Raymie Stata's message [Re: Intellectual property rights] as of Feb 27, 16:10
To: Raymie Stata <raymie@larch.lcs.mit.edu>, libertarians@MIT.EDU
In your message [Re: Intellectual property rights]
+------------------------------
|
| > Kevin writes:
| >
| > [Drug company D spends billions to develop a new product and takes
| > not steps to protect itself from competition. Sure enough, a
Just how is drug company D supposed to "protect itself from competition"
(legally)? In chip design, there are some tricks that can foul up
attempts to reverse-engineer chips (e.g., false paths whose lack of
conduction can't be discovered without complex, site-specific testing).
Please explain to us how a drug company can do this, in a way which does
not hamper the actions of the drug.
I suppose every purchaser could be asked to sign non-disclosure
agreements, though if one person violated the agreement and gave a
capsule to the competitor, who then claimed independent invention,
it would be almost impossible for the inventor to prove which of the
thousands of users was responsible for the leak.
| > competitor swoops in and takes advantage of D, and D goes out of biz
| > because it can't recoup the billions.]
| >
| > Fair?
|
| Fair? Yes. Smart? No.
You are blaming the victim of theft of i.p. for not being smart?
| Protecting your biz from competition is part of doing biz. Patent
| laws have just allowed the drug market to avoid structuring itself
| around this fact of biz. In industries in which companies cannot use
| patent laws as an absolute shield against competition the way drug
| companies can (eg, computers, cars, overnight delivery, and almost
| everything _but_ drug companies),
How are patent laws an absolute shield against competition in the
drug biz? If I come up with a cure for AIDS, you can come up with
your own cure for AIDS. You just can't copy mine. Most diseases
can be attacked with more than one molecule.
Note that you can't claim intellectual property for the *idea* of having
a product. For instance, if I patent a cure for AIDS, I can't claim
that the idea of curing AIDS is mine. I can only claim my specific
molecule.
| How would drug companies get competitive advantages from R&D
| investments? I can't say. If I were such a biz-genius that I could
| think of such things off the top of my head w/out even being involved
| in the industry, I'd be a multi-billionaire by now. This relates to
| what I said before: technology isn't the only important idea that goes
| into a successful venture. Good ideas in competitive positioning and
| other management-like stuff is also important. Us MIT'ers tend to
| think that technology is the only intellectually hard part of doing
| biz; perhaps that's why we think it's so special that it requires
| special protection that other good ideas don't deserve.
It's not just an MIT thing. The Founding Fathers thought the same thing.
| Note also that I can't say how privatized roads, fire, sewer, water,
| etc. will operate, and I can't say how to transfer welfare-dependents
| out of the welfare system.
But you should be able to produce at least one credible scenario
to illustrate how each *could* work. (Libertarians usually oblige
on this.) Leonard Peikoff, in his Understanding Objectivism course,
advocated concretizing broad abstractions whenever possible in order
to avoid rationalism.
| Just as the transportation industry would have to restructure itself
| if we completely privatized and deregulated it, so the the drug
| industry would restructure itself if it were deregulated (and I
| include getting rid of patents as part of that deregulation). I can't
| say for sure what either the transportation or drug industries would
| be like after these restructurings, but I know they'd be better than
| they are now.
How do you know this? I argue that they would be worse, because
development of new drugs would grind to a halt.
Kevin
