One thing that I hope will come out of this coronavirus event, even if just for a short while, is that people no longer at large accept that this anti-social behavior is just "doing business".
And I realize the article was updated to give a "royalty free license", which is complete and total bullshit because BioFire shouldn't need a license for Theranos' bullshit patents that never worked anyway.
We need to start naming and shaming for this kind of trolling, anti-social behavior. And not just the company name, I'm talking about the principals and lawyers who filed this, who are nothing but a net-negative to society.
There are super smart people I respect but they accept bad behavior as a form of pragmatism. Like they’ll excuse patent trolls because they’re just working a legal angle and trying to make money like everyone else.
This idea that unethical things are just a consequence of circumstance and survival is flawed. We shouldn’t excuse those aggressively working to increase the surveillance state or corporate profits just because that’s their job —- we can be better than that.
> There are super smart people I respect but they accept bad behavior as a form of pragmatism. Like they’ll excuse patent trolls because they’re just working a legal angle and trying to make money like everyone else.
They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.
They're unbelievably ignorant and likely hide that ignorance under the guise of expertise in an unrelated field literally filling your life and others with bullshit. Stop calling fuckos like the ones at Labrador "smart." Stop calling anyone who thinks they're smart "smart."
Call them "fuckos," because that's what they are...
Yeah - I wouldn't have said it so strongly but I fundamentally agree that we shouldn't excuse beliefs based on perceptions of people's intelligence. If their claim is incorrect the claim is what stands on it's own, it doesn't matter who said it. The reason that experience and intelligence matter is because they allow people putting forward those claims to make stronger arguments or know what arguments to make/experiments to run to validate the claim. Intelligence and experience can hell you make better claims, but claims shouldn't be given any more weight or validity because they come from someone with experience or a high score in some (probably somewhat arbitrary and highly subjective) score of experience - that's the core principle of meritocracy in my opinion.
But empathy can be an indicator of intelligence. If your definition of intelligence is based on ability to answer very limited questions on an IQ test, your definition is flawed. True intelligence comes from being able to reason about incredibly complex systems. This is the type of reasoning that leads you to believe that socialism is not antithetical to capitalism.
Where money can be made, money will be made. I had a colleague that was proudly saying "if it was legalsto sell heroin to kids I would be setting camp outside schools making a million per day". In my question "and what about the dead kids?"
His answer always was "not my problem, if there is no law for this or that then I'm in it"
Unfortunately there are too many assholes out there.
They are intelligent, with the ethics of a rock, and this is the outcome when these two are combined.
>They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.
lol is this the "any alien civilization far in advance of us will be peaceful" assumption? there are hordes of very very smart people (by any metric - iq, success, wealth) that either lack empathy or are straight up antipathetic. how about we stop valorizing smart people and start valorizing empathetic people instead?
It's a systemic problem with capitalism and markets.
Any system based on brutal winner-takes-all competition and monopolistic domination is unable to deal intelligently or rationally with a significant external challenge.
Gameify certain activities by all means, but everyone needs to get real about the incredible fragility and poor long-term survival prospects of a system that thinks of mutual aid and cooperation as weaknesses that can be exploited.
I am not a lawyer, but I wonder if laws against hoarding physical goods like hand sanitizer during an emergency also apply to so called intellectual property.
Does it? I don’t know. Should it? In the case of a global pandemic, it should, IMO. That includes making any vaccines or treatments widely available at or near cost, possibly with government subsidies. Things change when tens or hundreds of millions of lives are on the line.
Edit: I don’t know exactly where the line of IP as a public good lies, but with this many lives at stake, we’re certainly well into that kind of territory.
> Things change when tens or hundreds of millions of lives are on the line.
Is it Ok when it’s just tens of thousands, thousands, hundreds? At which number it becomes acceptable to abuse patents to sell overpriced medicines for the sick?
The system needs improvements. The pandemic is temporal. The injustice have been there for many years.
I’m purposely not drawing an exact line. Nonetheless, when potentially hundreds of millions of lives are at stake globally, it’s safe to say we’ve crossed over into IP as a public good land.
> Does it? I don’t know. Should it? In the case of a global pandemic, it should not, IMO. That includes making any vaccines or treatments widely available at or near cost, possibly with government subsidies. Things change when tens or hundreds of millions of lives are on the line.
>> Does it? I don’t know. Should it? In the case of a global pandemic, it should not, IMO.
Did you include a not when you meant to not include it?
> We need to start naming and shaming for this kind of trolling, anti-social behavior.
We need regulations. As I wrote before, a company is an entity having the sole purpose of making as much money as legally possible. Loose regulations = abuse, it's as simple as that.
If you tell your kid it's ok to hit people on the head with a stick you can't blame the neighbour kid when he hits you on the head with a stick.
I think there is a lot to be said about social trust and reputation when it comes to brands/companies/individuals. We are seeing that it actually does work and that companies respond when they are called out on bad behavior. Maybe not always, but enough to make a difference.
This makes me believe that society has more control than it thinks and that we don't need as much heavy handed government controls that can have unintended consequences and strip us of our freedoms.
"BioFire shouldn't need a license for Theranos' bullshit patents that never worked anyway"
There seems to be a lot of hate for the patent system. The idea of protecting investment in innovation and allowing for public disclosure through a patent is a good thing. Patent Trolls and, sometimes, corporations weaponize these by twisting the language or intent of the patent, but that doesn't mean all patents are BS, even if a company flounders. The patent office also grants its fair share of questionable patents.
Theranos raised more than US$700 million in funding. That's a lot of money and research, regardless of the execution or product failures.
My honest questions are, have you looked at the patents in the lawsuit? Are they really "bullshit," or did Theranos innovate in a way that BioFire is now using?
There is a lot of hate for the patent system because it is obviously broken. First, as noted in the Ars Technica article, you don't actually have to show that your invention works to get a patent. Second, you don't actually have to be the one producing your invention and making it available to those who can benefit from it to claim patent rights. Third, independent invention doesn't defend you against a patent lawsuit. And fourth, the patent office does not even try to apply the actual standards required for an invention to be patentable: that it must be original, non-obvious, and an enhancement over prior art.
If those things were fixed, I think there would be a lot less hate for the patent system. Also, of course, this particular patent lawsuit would never have been possible.
I can assure you, Theranos made no meaningful innovation in anything besides fraud. All of their researchers were either being fed bullshit data, so their conclusions are worthless, or were generating bullshit data, in which case they were a scam.
> The idea of protecting investment in innovation and allowing for public disclosure through a patent is a good thing.
That's theory and an outdated dream.
Practice is that patents are nowadays just their to defend monopolies.
They are there to be sure to atomise the concurrence which is too weak to afford an army of lawyers.
Patents are the legal version of the nuclear bomb. Nothing good get out of it, it costs to everybody a shit tons of money and you never use it for anything serious or MAD is guarantee
As someone who was involved with the patent process for a "legitimate" invention -- meaning one that really was useful and did take considerable thought, time and money to design -- I was somehow both happy and disappointed with the patent lawyer's initial reaction. He said it was a pleasant change to be writing up something where there it a technical person supplying the information and the disclosure really was a genuine advance in the state of the art that might later benefit others. I think there was a recognition and perhaps even a little professional pride there that this was how things were always supposed to work.
He also said that a lot of the time they just get handed some sort of vague write-up with little if any help to understand it nor much access to any technical expert involved in creating it. They have to turn it into the right format to describe something and try and extract the key words or phrases that look interesting in order to build up the hierarchy of claims, but there's little real understanding there and the results probably reflect that.
Most saddening of all, he said that often works anyway, because ultimately a patent enforcement action is going to take place in a court, and it's likely to be a non-expert jury you have to convince of your case. Rather like a complex fraud trial, the issues involved may well be beyond the understanding of some of those jurors, and so to a regrettable degree. What wins cases can be who had the prettiest illustrations or had managed to coin the most intuitively relevant but still distinctive terminology.
Thank you for the real world perspective on at least some of this... I honestly have no involvement but just see the stream of trolls and blanket patent grants and I have to assume things are rotten.
From my experience, both filing and researching, there are good patents out there that do disclose useful things that did require some real investment to come up with them. The disclosure and the potential to licence things for mutual benefit with the inventors are beneficial in these cases. And as mentioned before, the patent lawyer I worked with seemed to be appreciate being able to use the system as intended and was keen to make sure we did get things right.
I think it's just that, like almost any government-run system almost anywhere, the relevant authorities are often under-resourced and under-qualified. There aren't enough patent examiners to keep things running at a reasonable speed, and the ones there are can't all be experts on everything or even most areas where they examine. That means the system as a whole primarily benefits large organisations that can churn out applications and get lots of them granted almost like throwing darts at a wall. Then you get the cross-licensing cabals that are weaponising their patents to prevent small-scale competition from gaining a foothold, which is the opposite of the intended effect, and the patent trolls, and other negative actors in the system.
I do have very mixed feelings on what should or should not be patentable and whether different types of invention should all be treated the same way, and indeed this very discussion is a good demonstration of why that is. But the basic principle, applied in fields where it really does promote research and disclosure, has its merits.
The system was changed a few years ago to first to file, not first to invent. There's no reason to believe that anything has actually been invented behind that patent.
Do you really want to set a precedent that (intellectual) property rights are suspended in times of crisis? Maybe I have a great idea for curing coronavirus infections, but now I don't want to pour money into to r&d for it because I know that the government won't uphold my patents next time a coronavirus epidemic rolls around.
Couldn't have said it better. "Why would i develop something that could save millions of lives if it will save millions of lives and might not make me money". Absurd
That sounds reasonable to reasonable people, yes. But remember that US presidents have considered us in a state of emergency over a drug pandemic for decades. In the US, power like this will always find a way to be used for racist and nepotistic reasons. We're going from 0 to 100 here real quick, and we need to think through the long-term repercussions a little bit.
if you’re thinking about profit motive at a time like this you are part of the problem. Full stop
People will remember. A decade or two ago, during a flu outbreak that had pandemic potential (I think it was 2006), the government of Indonesia refused to share early samples. The reason? In the past, vaccine manufacturers had refused to sell flu vaccine during pandemics at a discount to the developing country.
From a game-theoretic viewpoint it makes sense - Indonesia isn't worse off if it refuses to cooperate, Indonesian citizens will die anyway. Israel calls this stance "Samson Option".
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary
The irony of posting this sentence on a website displaying royalty free HTML, on a network that was first built to allow royalty free sharing of information between the military and scientists, with the servers running on royalty free GNU/Linux in a web browser based on royalty free Mosaic and discussing the issue with a whole bunch of unpaid people who like to discuss things for the sheer fun of it, is staggering.
>The only incentive for innovation on this planet is monetary
This reads very much like the anti-atheist argument of, "Who's going to stop you from raping and pillaging if there's no almighty being keeping you in line?"
It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society.
> It seems more like an indictment of the speaker than of the rest of society.
It most certainly is, I have Christian friends that have used that exact line asking me how I can have morals as an atheist without the threat of a higher diety. As if being nice for the sake of just being nice is an impossible concept. Or in this case that only money would inspire me to do work. As we know from studies, money isn't the only incentive for innovation. In fact at a certain point, ~75k it tends to become less of an incentive.
In a world you share with other humans, not so much.
Let's say you are in a freak accident, and are paralyzed. Will you commit to only getting the care you can actually pay for by your own earnings for the rest of your life?
And how do you bootstrap yourself out of the hundreds of thousands in medical debt for the lifesaving care you get before you even get home?
A lot of things happen around this planet because we care for each other, and we help each other. Sorry you can't see that.
What I understand is that we have decided that one particular measurement, GDP, has been taken to be more valuable than all other measurements. Such as, but not limited to, human welfare.
It's been this way since for decades, and we are now laying in the bed that was made.
I wish I could remember where I read it yesterday—so many articles on the science, but also the policy and history, that they blur together; but someone pointed out "this thing that you (GP imchillyb, not moosey) think is a natural law has actually only been the case for 50 years, and need not continue forever."
At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically.
Those in power want us to believe that current power structures were inevitable, that the world wants to return to the current mean should we try to change it. We just have to stop people from getting power over others. I think that this is best achieved through random selection of leadership.
> At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically.
That's true, and a good point, but this was much more pointed: less "had humanity evolved differently, we could have been nicer people" and more "what seems like the inevitably market- and capitalism-focussed way of life that's all anyone has ever experienced was actually a creation of the '60's and after." (Sort of like the current geopolitics of the US, which seem eternal to those of us, like me, who came of political age when they were already fairly well established, but which have actually changed dramatically in the mere 250-ish years the US has been around to have geopolitics.)
For the "self-interest produces efficiency" people:
Here is a payout diagram for the two-player antisocial/prosocial game:
(A,A)=(6,6)
(A,P)=(15,5)
(P,A)=(5,15)
(P,P)=(12.5, 12.5)
The unique Nash equilibrium is (A,A). That is the United States right now. Please carefully read Adam Smith [1] before making arguments about incentives and efficiency.
As evidence, I present all of the charitable giving and volunteering related to medicine.
It is entirely possible for a thing that saves fewer lives to generate more profit. That's bad, and proves that profit is not 1:1 correlated with value generated.
Jonas Salk was the closest I came to idolizing a person due to this. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of PR on Salk's part. He tried to patent it and was refused. That's not to say he wouldn't have licensed it for free anyway, but he never had to face that moral dilemma.
"They found that it wasn't novel enough to count as a new invention, though. So really, Salk's vaccine was never patented because it was never eligible for a patent, according to Jane S. Smith, who sifted through the March of Dimes' archives for her book "Patenting the Sun."[1]
>And of course, you can defensively patent something and then not enforce the patent too...
That's the same point I made in the above post (albeit through the mechanism of free licensing vs. non-enforcement).
"They" is important because it wasn't self-funded research.
"There was near unanimity within the organization that the public had already paid for the polio vaccine through their donations"[1]
And it wasn't just the March of Dimes. The funding bodies also knew it wasn't patentable. It's not much of a logical leap for Salk to have been part of that discussion and likely had the same conclusion.
"is that legally it was thought to be unpatentable. The National Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh, where much of the work was done, had looked into patenting the vaccine."[2]
It's not meant to disparage Salk. I doubt he would have chosen to patent it even if it was possible. But, like I stated in the previous post, he was never faced with that decision. There's better examples of corporate altruism (some of which are already mentioned in this thread)
The article makes it sounds like a more institutional decision not to move forward, which I think is rather different than attempting to spin a refusal into good personal PR.
Is it capitalism or a broken culture that celebrates avarice?
Capitalism + public industrial policy made some serious progress. Back in the day there used to be this word called "solidarity". Capitalism does quite well when divorced from the weird self-interest dogma we've cultivated over the past 30-40 years.
Say you're a toilet paper maker. In normal times => "your product is trivial to produce, why are you charging so much" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit. In crisis => "why are you thinking about profit" => razor-thin margins => almost no profit.
Meanwhile, you have politicians and multinationals evading tax, landlords and universities exploiting naive & vulnerable populations, Uber & Facebook skirting legislation and making bank, CEOs getting away with billions after burning $50B, elites raping kids and getting away with it, ... real "social responsibility".
Yet nothing that isn't paid for, can get done at any scale. The profit motive here was absurd. But any company that makes something useful for this pandemic, must find a business model that works. Else it won't happen.
Yet nothing that isn't paid for, can get done at any scale.
That doesn't mean it has to be privately funded with an arbitrarily large profit margin, though. In much of the world, we publicly fund some research, we fund quite a lot of medical research through charitable organisations as well, and we operate largely centralised public or at least semi-public healthcare services that buy the end results of the successful research at reasonable rates because of their huge negotiating power.
I think a lot of people from the US who have never been abroad for an extended period might not even realise how far behind normal standards the US really is in terms of how it manages its medical research and healthcare provision. People in much of the world really would assume you were joking if you said someone could go bankrupt just because they were unlucky and got sick, or that vital treatments that could save many lives might be withheld just because of profits.
Ironically, this is one of the main issues that torpedoed a US-EU trade deal not that long ago after many years of negotiations, probably at considerable economic cost to both parties. The general issue of excessive patent rights, and some national issues in member states such as the NHS being the "third rail" of UK politics, turned out to be deal-breakers.
Theranos never had a working product and actively did harm, so I don’t know how having patents would have ever helped them scale that business model.
Beyond that, these are extraordinary circumstances. There will be plenty of bailouts and stimulus for you to scale your business model when the dust settles; let’s focus on scaling our response and systems to meet this crisis first shall we?
Not having to have a working _product_ is actually sensible IMO: maybe patent terms should be limited in such situations (half perhaps).
If I invent a new space rocket, how am I going to keep it quiet, as a small time inventor, long enough to get funding, and build the rocket (we're looking at 1000s of NDAs and warding off an entire rocket production facility from public view) ... do I then have to submit it for testing to make sure it conforms to the invention the patent was applied for? Maybe that requires dismantling it, or witnessing it in operation in an extra-terrestrial planets atmosphere (Mars landing capability, say) ... it's just not workable to require an embodiment to be produced.
Aside: most countries have utility or design patents that protect actual products, but these are in addition to technology patents because working around a single embodiment or design is relatively easy to do, working around a mode of operation is not.
Patent applications are already supposed to be enabling disclosures, that is guides to the skilled person in that field which would enable them to work the invention. This requirement has maybe slipped a bit; but in the US8283155 patent in question they seem to give reasonable information about the operation and scope of their idea [it's not my field].
Yes, I absolutely want to set that precedent: live and death situations are more important than IP rights. You can always sort that kind of stuff out after the fact ("turns out that was a valid patent, and you were licensing it for $X before this all happened, so looks like someone owes you $X and let's figure out who that is"), but you can't get back dead neighbors who were lost due to legal delays.
Weird things like software patents and ludicrously long copyrights aside, the notion of IP has worked out decently for us. There's no way it's more important than directly saving human lives though.
Do you really want to set a precedent that (intellectual) property rights are suspended in times of crisis?
Maybe, but I'd argue that the problem was granting IP rights too strong in the first place. Patents are, in principle, a useful incentive for R&D, but when the products of that R&D are medical in nature, the ethics of allowing them to be withheld become very shaky. In particular, granting patents that allow R&D organisations to recover the true overall cost of their work and make a sufficient profit to justify the endeavour is one thing, but granting patents that allow monopoly providers to set arbitrarily high costs on essential treatments is another thing entirely.
And before anyone suggests that there is no alternative to keep that research going, consider that typically it is not actually the researchers who are raking in those big profits. It is entirely possible that a centrally funded public research service that hired the same experts and provided the same labs and then used its own or external manufacturing facilities for mass production would work out more cost effective for a centralised healthcare system than the current way things work particularly in the US.
Sure but lets not lose sight of the problem here, which is the system's severe abuse. Regardless of if it's a pandemic or not.
Though arguably if a company went ahead and leaped into action and saved millions of lives, when the patent holder didn't lift a finger. There is some debate on whether or not that should be punished and how that should be handled.
Physical property rights are suspended in times of crisis. Why not intellectual property rights?
How is it ethical to let a debate about compensation, which can be had in the future, stop you from saving lives you can save, today? Especially when you're the state and it's literally your job.
Trying to prevent a coronavirus test being used because someone might owe you license fees for which you'll sue in court is plainly murder.
I think a lawyer arguing that should be at minimum disbarred, and possibly jailed, at least like someone who was violating quarantine and trying to infect people on purpose.
You'll find IP legislation has provisions for protecting national security and for use in times of war or other national emergencies; cf UK Patents Act SS 55-59 (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-patent-act-1977).
Post a progress report about any lifesaving tech you develop, or ideas you could get into production, so when the time comes we the people with feelings for each other can shun you into oblivion and solve the problem ourselves.
"If I don't make money from it, I won't bother to help save lives."
We can do without you. Even if you're medicine's Einstein and Edison rolled up together, we'll do without you.
And I realize the article was updated to give a "royalty free license", which is complete and total bullshit because BioFire shouldn't need a license for Theranos' bullshit patents that never worked anyway.
We need to start naming and shaming for this kind of trolling, anti-social behavior. And not just the company name, I'm talking about the principals and lawyers who filed this, who are nothing but a net-negative to society.