You are getting close to advocating for "cost plus" which sounds really good to outsiders who are concerned about "too much profit" but have stunted every industry into which they have been deployed, and end up driving prices as suppliers look for ways to increase how much they spend. (The more they spend, the more profit they can make.) Look at the aerospace industry.
I'm not concerned about too much profit. I'm just concerned about stifling competition for too long. Patents feel like crony capitalism in some industries.
After posting I did consider the lone software engineer who comes up with a great idea, creates an app, and his app is then copied by Google who has much better marketing and distribution resources.
If patent duration was a function of investment in R&D, this software developer would be SOL because he invested little into his "eureka" idea.
This is nuts. By the time a major drug is ready for market, out of a 20 year patent there are usually only 5 years left. How much shorter do you think it should be? When they are operating under that kind of deadline, they don't have time for word-of-mouth marketing.
For software, sure, I'm really willing to hear arguments that 20 years is too long. But drug patents lifetimes are already very small. If something is too expensive, wait a few years.
> In medicine, you often can't just wait it out. Healthcare is not a normal market
Then you pay.
I have family members who are only functional because of prescription drugs. When I see someone on HN talk about how "oh, it will probably be okay if we mess with this market, I read this really cool article online that said so," I see them no different than someone who decided on their own to start tinkering with grandpa's iron lung, because "oh, it will probably be okay." You don't know what you are messing with. Stop it.
>And for most new drugs, patents expire approximately 12 years after market introduction.
I don't know what the HBR's source is because they don't tell me. I am telling you to find any drug you see newly on the market, particularly one you see on tv since you worry about marketing budgets, and look up when its patent expires.
And if you can't afford it? Does society pay? Do we let them die? I'm interested in your answer.
>I have family members who are only functional because of prescription drugs.
Me too.
>I don't know what the HBR's source is because they don't tell me.
And I don't know where your 5 year number comes from because you didn't provide a source.
When I see someone on HN talk about how "oh, it will probably be okay if we leave the market alone, I read this really cool article online that said so," I see them no different than someone who stood by a river and watched their grandfather struggle against the current, because "oh, it will probably be okay." You don't know what you are talking about. Stop it.
> And if you can't afford it? Does society pay? Do we let them die? I'm interested in your answer.
The same thing that happens with the people whose lives could be saved right now if we stopped funding roads, or basic research, or investing in the city's water system, or educating first-graders, or researching drugs, or enforcing the property rights of rich people, or a bunch of other things that aren't going to pay off for years and are not associated with one's political party. It's not that the parties being funded are all completely honest and trustworthy, but that the money still needs to be spent. Drug research is one of the small number of things society does that actually add to the public good forever. Every year amazing drugs that do amazing things go off-patent. It's an amazing system and our children should be awed by how much stuff they will have. "Hepatitis C" will be like "polio" for them.
There is no reason to think the years 2010-2025 are some magic perfect ground where the drugs from pre-2010 are completely unsuitable and all the drugs that will be invented in year 2025 and beyond are unimportant or will still be found if a bunch of people who understand neither biochemistry nor economics rebuilt the economic system around it.
Every generation has the option to quit investing in the future. There are always people who want to stop all the painful sacrifices that are required right now, and just live off of yesterday's accumulated sacrifices and then go to sleep.
There will always be some procedure that keeps people alive but that costs Too Much Money. It's how most countries have kept their health care costs under control without noticeably impacting QALYs. There should be no doubt that there are people who died sooner because of these decisions, but the system works and doesn't bankrupt them. If "but we can't let someone die for a reason as stupid as money" is your terminal argument, be thankful you weren't in charge, or else society would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. These are hard decisions but adults need to make them, and generally adults do make them and things work out.
> When I see someone on HN talk about how "oh, it will probably be okay if we leave the market alone
I think there's a lot that can be improved about the market. I have a lot to say about that, but you are trying so hard to be cute and using children's arguments that goodwill can no longer be assumed. Good night and good luck.
Unfortunately I'm one of those guys who just really enjoys having the last word lol.
>The same thing that happens with the people whose lives could be saved right now if we...
I'm just looking for an answer to the question. Right now society pays for treatments that can't be afforded. Furthermore, I'm actually pro drug development when most of your response seems to think I'm not. I actually think that the current system does not support R&D like it should.
>I think there's a lot that can be improved about the market. I have a lot to say about that, but you are trying so hard to be cute and using children's arguments that goodwill can no longer be assumed. Good night and good luck.
I'm a mirror, you're glue... :P But seriously, I am citing my sources, there's even a huge post in here a bit upstream you can read with all sorts of sources debunking a couple industry claims. The point of turning your quote around is to show that those sorts of diatribes aren't particularly useful.
Why is one length of patent good for all drugs. Create the cure for cancer I can see you getting 30 years, add a antacid to an existing drug you should get 5.
Perhaps they should be different, but people get most upset about the awesome drugs that cure things completely being under patent for so long. They don't care about that antacid drug so much. You would find yourself very short on allies with your proposal.
All the money going towards marketing would instead go towards lobbying, towards getting the government agency in charge of deciding "what really counts" for deciding that this drug should be one of them. When the US government was looking at how to create incentives for invention, they did look at rewards systems, and this was the common problem. Using the market system, for all its faults and ways it could be improved, at least sends proper price signals to producers and consumers.
We are being asked to make the same hard decisions that each generation before us has made. And we are doing it while being far richer and having a greater repository of knowledge than them. Something's wrong with us if we quit where they preserved in worse conditions.
WHO is far richer, and WHO should pay for it? Are we fine with these companies spending 1/4 of their combined profits and marketing on R & D, as J&J does? At best, this is a remarkably inefficient way to drive innovation.
The largest 10 pharmaceutical companies spent a combined $32.5B more on sales and marketing than R & D. No problem here? People are skipping dosing to stretch their meds further. Some people can't afford meds at all.
I think it would probably work out better to have a 15% excise tax on all pharmaceutical chemicals and preparations, charged on the wholesale price, collected at the shipping dock of the manufacturer or at the port of entry. This would go exclusively to fund a "research royalty" to the individuals who conduct drug research into utility, safety, and efficacy.
I don't have any specifics as to how that would be distributed, but it should likely emphasize the importance of replication and value purity of the methods over whether the results are positive or negative.
Right now, there are significant financial incentive that may bias research studies towards positive results. The patent system is magnifying those incentives.
The strategy people should be following is to buy the printer based on the cost of consumables. It's what I do. But most people do the strategy of
1. find the model where the company subsidizes the printer to sell the ink
2. Then try to work around the lockouts the company has on the ink market.
Both sides are trying to screw each other over. I see no reason to care. If the people trying to use third-party ink really succeed, all that will happen is that the market strategy will disappear, and so the third-party ink market will vanish. (I really wonder how you run a business where if you really win you go out of business. You need to hope the other side keeps on fighting just enough that you can attract all the people who enjoy fighting over pennies.)
You are assuming that the average customer knows that the company is subsidizing the printer to sell the ink. . . I don't think that is true. I think the average person sees a great deal on a printer and is genuinely surprised when they find it drinks ink like it's Octoberfest.
At the time of purchase you can find these things out by researching the price of the replacement ink cartridge and its page rating. (Page rating is soft/fudgeable but should at least be a reasonable way to ballpark the lifespan of the cartridge.) I would consider this cursory research when evaluating a purchase that takes an ongoing supply of consumables.
To me it sort of seems like you're saying "Wow this dryer uses way more electricity than I thought it would!" or "Wow I bought this razor handle and the blades are really expensive!" or "Wow Swiffer really screws you with the replacement wipes!" or "Wow this car takes expensive tires!" -- even though the numbers for the ongoing consumables were available at the time of purchase.
So every time I buy a swifter or razor or dryer I have to do thorough research on things like power consumption, cost of replacement parts etc. No! I have a life, I have other things to do. I buy from large brand names like Lexar because I expect them to be honest and engage in fair dealing and because researching every aspect of products I buy would be a full time job in itself.
I get where you're coming from, but this concept you take issue with goes by another name: "due diligence"
I'd even argue that selling a cheap ~$50 printer and then expecting to make it back on consumables is a legitimate business model. If you're the kind of person who prints once in a blue moon, it makes more sense than buying a ~$200 laser printer.
Printers are generally expensive and generally last a few years. They're not casual, off-the-cuff purchases. Much like a computer, they are a precision machine, but with many more moving parts. I really don't believe it's unreasonable to do a couple hours worth of research on something that'll be in your home or office, possibly doing Important Serious Business Things, for years.
When I was at a start-up and had someone literally rip-off our product (including typos), we would have really liked some faster protection than the patent, which took around 2 years to issue.
As a business matter, we would have happily accepted a shorter lifespan in return for a quicker decision.
You say typos so I assume you are referring to software, which has an automatic copyright on creation, and can be enforced much easier and faster than a patent.
They're a law firm that specializes in _patents_. When all you have is a hammer....
Also, presumably you failed to register your software with the copyright office before the infringement began. In such a case you're less likely to get a fat damages award. Which is actually a good reason to pursue a patent claim, but if we're being cynical it's also a good reason for a firm to _prefer_ a patent claim.
The fact of the matter is that if the case was a slam dunk as you say, you should have been able to get an injunction fairly quickly, depending on when this occurred. Step one to seeking an injunction would have been to register your software (or a component of the software, if you didn't want to divulge the whole thing) with the Copyright Office. Currently their e-filing website says it'd take 6-10 months. It used to be much shorter than that. A few years ago, IIRC, I received a certificate in less than 90 days. In any event, that's much shorter than 2 years.
It's also a good lesson: always register at least some component of your software with the Copyright Office; a component that an infringer would necessarily have to copy. To get through the courthouse doors you need a certificate from the Copyright Office, but it doesn't have to cover the entire, larger work. It's more of a procedural hurdle of the copyright statute that courts construe very liberally, so you needn't be afraid of having to publish all your source code just to get a certificate.
The nice thing about copyright is that it's simple enough that you don't really need to involve a lawyer. Of course, you don't do this to the exclusion of any patent filings, but it's a smart move that is almost zero cost. Paste your software into a TeX document, generate a PDF, and upload it to the Copyright Office website. Easy peasey.
> They're a law firm that specializes in _patents_.
What the fuck. Oh, you got that when you googled them, and you think the fucking top-tier national IP law firm had no other ideas at all because the patent hadn't issued yet.
They blamed it on a rogue employee, and then claimed that they had removed all our typos and that we would need to sue them if there was anything more we needed to demand. It wasn't until the patent came out, two years later, that we could finally get them to stop shipping their crap.
If we had been offered something that lasted half as long but issued twice as fast, we would have taken that in a heartbeat.
Because you could hire a lawyer for a flat thousand bucks easily. Real estate agent is going to take 7 percent of the sale. So you get more qualified for way less money on most cases.
Here in North Carolina the buyers realtor fees are entirely paid by the seller so there's really no reason not to get one. Ours was really helpful in getting things lined up and providing checklists and support when we had questions.
If the seller stands to pay your agent 3% of the sale proceeds, the seller will typically be happy to reduce the price by 3% if you don't have an agent.
I just sold a condo in Minneapolis using a flat fee company -- fantastic experience and will never use a realtor again, save for maybe if looking internationally in a very unfamiliar area perhaps.
area where it concerns overhead due to law seems does seem ripe for disruption. But my concern is that this isn't a technical challenge, but rather political/legal one.
I mean that the buying/selling process is rather backward in technology and there's a lot of misunderstanding. The difficulties are less political and more inertial.
A primarily digital brokerage would be (is) a huge improvement.
This is generally not true. The seller of the home has a contract with the listing realtor. If there is no second realtor the listing realtor will usually get 5% or 5.5% instead of just 3%.
TurboTax found several thousand dollars for me in a fairly complicated tax situation that I was completely not expecting and would never have realized on my own. Even some CPAs I've talked to have said "oh, really?" They've bought some tremendous goodwill from me with that. I'm probably sticking with them forever.
The idea is to make it easier for the average person. Those involved with subchapter S corporations are probably not amateurs and are not the target audience.
Taxes are easy for the average person. A basic 1040-A, and certainly 1040-EZ (these two cover most taxpayers), are not difficult to do on paper if you can read and have a little patience.
I'm not defending Intuit here, by the way. But most people don't need what they are selling.
True, you need the full 1040 return for that, but most people don't have enough deductions to itemize -- that was my point. The average tax return is a 1040A or 1040EZ with the standard deduction. Those are easy.
I wasn't arguing against that. Rather against the conceit that my tax situation must be the result of people conspiring to keep things complicated, when the big thing (that got me thousands of dollars) was probably something that cannot really be simplified much further. Yet TT found it for me when lots of CPAs just didn't understand it.
I have a moderately complicated tax situation. Own property. Some investments. Occasional AMT hit for options. TurboTax handles all of this well. I am happy to pay $100 where before I could easily spend ten times as much on a CPA. That said, they really should allow auto-file for people with simple returns.
You got me, developer2. I've been commenting with my real name on HN for 5 years just waiting for this moment, to get the $35 that Intuit will mail me for my comment.
Have there been clinical studies of doing this to correct eyesight? A few years ago I would hear radio ads, which struck several of my snake-oil buttons, and they've totally disappeared from the radio, which presses a few more.
(Because I'm feeling kind I won't even make you groan by asking if the studies were double-blind.)
