<story><title>Judge Posner: U.S. patent system out of sync</title><url>http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-judge-posner-us-patent-system-out-of-sync-20120705,0,4814825.story</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>Posner&apos;s right.  It seems that there needs to be some new notion of what constitutes patentability.&lt;p&gt;Drugs are an interesting case as they have these factors going for it:&lt;p&gt;1) Expensive to bring IP to market.  Lots of testing and clinical trials for drugs.  For SW it is pretty cheap now.&lt;p&gt;2) Easy and cheap to copy.  Generic versions can be reverse-engineered quickly.  Probably just as easy to copy software, but I still feel like this is probably a useful pillar.&lt;p&gt;3) The IP by itself constitutes the majority of the value of the product.  In medicine there isn&apos;t typically tons of other IP around that come together to form the product.  In SW there is rarely a single piece of IP that is more than a small fraction of the value of the product.&lt;p&gt;4) The IP has longevity as a standalone product.  Viagra can be sold for decades.  Aspirin still probably does hundreds of millions in revenue.  There is little SW IP that, by itself, has longevity.  The nature of SW is to continuously improve it.&lt;p&gt;5) Time to market isn&apos;t a huge advantage.  Since most medicine is just sold as effectively a commodity, being 6m ahead of your competition usually just means you have 6 extra months of revenue.  Whereas in SW it also means that gives you 6 months to build on your current IP.  In medicine you don&apos;t typically do Viagra 2.0, with a boatload of new IP that makes the original obsolete (and hence any competitors shipping the old version scrambling).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>People love to cite drugs as being a case where patents work well.  But patents are far from a perfect fit for this problem.&lt;p&gt;Among other reasons, in an industry that is entirely dependent upon patent protection to defray the costs of getting FDA approval, it is impossible to get treatments through the approval process when they are not covered by patent.&lt;p&gt;For example somewhere on the order of half a million people in North America have Crohn&apos;s disease.  This is a rather nasty sickness that destroys quality of life, and requires lots of rounds of only marginally effective medication.  Research indicates that hookworm infection is an effective treatment.  The FDA has decided that this treatment requires their approval.  But you can&apos;t patent hookworms, and therefore nobody will pay for the necessary tests to get FDA approval.  And so a half-million people continue to suffer.&lt;p&gt;If the rules were changed to grant a temporary monopoly to the company that got FDA approval for a treatment, this problem would vanish.  A number of known treatments would go through trials and get approved.</text></comment>
<story><title>Judge Posner: U.S. patent system out of sync</title><url>http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-judge-posner-us-patent-system-out-of-sync-20120705,0,4814825.story</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>Posner&apos;s right.  It seems that there needs to be some new notion of what constitutes patentability.&lt;p&gt;Drugs are an interesting case as they have these factors going for it:&lt;p&gt;1) Expensive to bring IP to market.  Lots of testing and clinical trials for drugs.  For SW it is pretty cheap now.&lt;p&gt;2) Easy and cheap to copy.  Generic versions can be reverse-engineered quickly.  Probably just as easy to copy software, but I still feel like this is probably a useful pillar.&lt;p&gt;3) The IP by itself constitutes the majority of the value of the product.  In medicine there isn&apos;t typically tons of other IP around that come together to form the product.  In SW there is rarely a single piece of IP that is more than a small fraction of the value of the product.&lt;p&gt;4) The IP has longevity as a standalone product.  Viagra can be sold for decades.  Aspirin still probably does hundreds of millions in revenue.  There is little SW IP that, by itself, has longevity.  The nature of SW is to continuously improve it.&lt;p&gt;5) Time to market isn&apos;t a huge advantage.  Since most medicine is just sold as effectively a commodity, being 6m ahead of your competition usually just means you have 6 extra months of revenue.  Whereas in SW it also means that gives you 6 months to build on your current IP.  In medicine you don&apos;t typically do Viagra 2.0, with a boatload of new IP that makes the original obsolete (and hence any competitors shipping the old version scrambling).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cushman</author><text>&amp;#62; In medicine you don&apos;t typically do Viagra 2.0, with a boatload of new IP that makes the original obsolete (and hence any competitors shipping the old version scrambling).&lt;p&gt;Actually, there is an entire class of drugs known in medicine as &quot;patent extenders&quot;. Take your expiring patented drug, alter the formulation, or attach an unnecessary chemical group that doesn&apos;t affect the mechanism of action, et voila! Twenty more years of monopoly.&lt;p&gt;As a result of this, there are drugs which were prescribed twenty years ago that are no longer available-- since the original developer has moved on to an &quot;improved&quot; version which may be less effective, while the generic version is not profitable enough to be widely available.&lt;p&gt;What this means for intellectual property, I&apos;m not sure. It&apos;s a tricky issue.</text></comment>