[781] in libertarians
Re: Intellectual property rights
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barrie Greene)
Mon Feb 27 19:15:12 1995
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 95 19:13:24 EST
From: bdgreene@MIT.EDU (Barrie Greene)
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
<The '486 is an _expression_ of an idea, not an idea itself, and thus
<deserves protections. Drug formulas are not expressions of ideas in
<this sense. See my 1st post.
I'm not clear on what basis you make this distinction. It seems
to me equally valid to argue that the "idea" in Kevin's example is "a
cure for AIDS", (or since this is probably way too general, perhaps "a
small molecule that prevents the growth of HIV by binding to and
inhibiting a particular viral enzyme") while the particular drug
designed is an expression of this idea. This seems all the more true in
cases where the drug is not something which previously existed, and is
only now being applied to the purpose of curing AIDS, but is a molecule
that whose structure and synthesis pathway had to be designed from basic
principles. Patenting the new drug does not prevent anyone else from
using the same idea -- if you also thought of blocking the same enzyme,
you can design your own molecule that does so, and if you figure out
what makes mine work, you might even design one that does the exact same
thing, only better. But you can't simply make duplicates of my patented
molecule any more than you can make duplicates of a patented computer
chip.
