PoliticalSpeak: will the Corbynistas lobby for a change in the patent system?

……. If you look at things such as the number of inventions presented at international fairs, the evidence suggests that 19th-century countries that lacked patent systems were no less innovative than those which had them, though they did innovate in somewhat different areas…… 

…….. However, the history of the industry raises doubts about such arguments. Until 1967 German drug companies could only patent the way they made drugs, not the formulae of the drugs themselves. Anyone could sell copies of the medicines if they found another method of making them……

…… America’s health systems, he noted, spent $210 billion on prescription drugs that year. Based on how much cheaper generic drugs were than patented ones, Mr Baker calculated that a competitive patent-free market might have provided the same drugs for no more than $50 billion. That represented a saving of $160 billion…….

…… The drug companies reckoned at the time that they were spending $25 billion on R&D; the government was spending $30 billion on basic medical research. The money it would have been able to save buying drugs for Medicare and Medicaid in a patent-free world have allowed the government to double that research spending, more than replacing industry’s R&D, while still leaving $130 billion in public benefit……

…….. With America’s prescription-drug bill now $374 billion, the opportunity looks all the greater, even though the companies now say they are putting $51 billion a year into R&D. Imagining that the government could spend R&D money as effectively as the corporate sector may sound like a stretch. But a government which simply wanted to make drugs available for competitive manufacture might find various ways to get innovative results from contract research companies. Joseph Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University, and others have suggested encouraging teams of autonomous scientists to develop new breakthrough drugs by offering those that succeed big prizes…….

…… After a promising drug was found the final, most expensive stages of clinical trials, which measure the efficacy of a drug that has already been shown to be safe, could be publicly funded, using another portion of the huge potential savings from cheaper drugs, and conducted by independent laboratories. Once a medicine was validated, any drug company would be allowed to make it. Alternatively, the trials could be made smaller, with companies required to earn the right to manufacture a drug that had been shown to be safe by scrupulously collecting and publishing data on how the drug compared with other treatments once it was in use…….

……. This is not as strange as it may sound. Many drug startups see their exit strategy as being bought up for a billion dollars or so by a big pharma company when their projects start to look promising. Billion-dollar prizes would provide similar incentives. Nor is it all that new: Robert MacFie, a leading Victorian patent-abolitionist, also favoured prizes……..

…… Six bills to reform patents in some way (including in one case by overturning an earlier reform) have been proposed to the current American Congress. None seeks abolition: any lawmaker brave enough to propose doing away with them altogether, or raising similar questions about the much longer monopolies given to copyright holders, would face an onslaught from the intellectual-property lobby……

……. But a top-to-bottom re-examination of whether patents and other forms of intellectual-property protection actually do their job, and even whether they deserve to exist, is long overdue. Simple abolition raises problems in terms of the ethics of property rights. But reductions in the duration of exclusive rights and differentiation between those rights for different sorts of innovation are possible, and could be introduced in steps over a number of years, allowing plenty of time for any ill effects to surface……