[Truth To Power]

Or maybe it’s because they have some of the best medical experts in the world.

No, that can't be it, because some of the best medical experts in the world are highly critical of drug patents.

[Hakeer]

Which is the slave owners' "argument," and thus already known in advance to be fallacious, disingenuous and evil, with no further argumentation needed. Right.

No you don't. You already proved that by claiming that only legal rights matter.

Or anyone else's. Right.

As does making land into private property. Every competent rights theorist in history has acknowledged that there is a problem with private ownership of natural resources. Some of them have tried to justify it anyway. None ever succeeded. The only difference between slavery and landowning is that slavery violates people's rights one person at a time, landowning violates them one right at a time.

Owning it does. Just as buying a slave does not violate his rights -- they were already completely violated by his previous owner -- but owning him does.

GET IT???

Yes, of course it does. It violates everyone else's rights to invent, produce and sell the drug: the patent holder is allowed to do it, but no one else is. That violates their rights by definition. Google "Elisha Gray" and start reading.

Because I believe all people have equal individual rights to liberty just by being living human beings. You don't. Simple.

Then was your ridiculous and disingenuous claim that it guarantees the holder will recoup his investment and no more a deliberate attempt to deceive readers?

My training is in logic, where we learn that even a single false premise will justify every false claim. I also think it is useful to demonstrate to readers that your "arguments" are not merely fallacious, but consistently disingenuous, counterfactual, and mendacious.

1. Did I say ONLY legal rights matter? No. What I said is that when we go to court, the judge is going to rule that you have no legal right to build your ugly statue 10 feet from my front door.

2. I also told you that I believe in human rights, and freedom from slavery is a human right. It is enshrined by Article 4 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I totally oppose it anywhere and everywhere whether legal or not.

3. You do not have either a legal right, human right, or any other right to infringe my patent or build your statue in my yard.

4. There is a big difference between owning another human being and owning a piece of dirt.

5. You don’t have a legal right to infringe my patent. That is clear. And it not a fundamental human right, either. The consequences do not elevate it to that status, as it does with slavery or murder. You are free to develop your own drug for the same disease, or market my drug after I have had an opportunity to recoup the $2 billion I invested to bring it to market.

6. I believe all people have equal rights under the First Amendment. However, I don’t believe you or anyone else has a “liberty right” to take or use my property without my consent. You do. That is where we disagree.

7. You study logic? LOL. Could have fooled me. I said I believe everything you said about how patents work is true. Assign a “T” to all those statements. Then, you declare, as usual, that you are right and I am wrong. Since we agree on everything you said about patents, we are either BOTH right or BOTH wrong. Logic.

8. I explicitly stated that there is no guarantee I will ever recoup my investment. If there are safety risks that didn’t arise in clinical trials, I may have to take it off the market and lose most of my investment and pay damages via class action lawsuit. Or a competitor may develop a drug that simply captures much more market share than mine.

[Hakeer]

No, that can't be it, because some of the best medical experts in the world are highly critical of drug patents.

Whether any drugs should have patents is intrinsically a political/economic question, not a question about Vitamin D and its efficacy for preventing or treating Covid. As I said, when it comes to the latter question, I’ll take the opinion of a Mayo Clinic doctor. A doctor may be very knowledgeable about Vitamin D but ignorant as hell about the economics of the pharmaceutical industry but nonetheless have opinions about it.

[Truth To Power]

1. Did I say ONLY legal rights matter? No.

You said your legal property "rights" -- actually government-issued and -enforced privileges -- are facts, while everyone else's natural individual rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor are merely my opinions.

What I said is that when we go to court, the judge is going to rule that you have no legal right to build your ugly statue 10 feet from my front door.

Or maybe he will rule that I do, if I happen to own that location, or it is public land I have been commissioned to create a statue for, etc. The ugliness of the statue and the proximity of your front door therefore have nothing to do with it. You are just trying to distract attention from the actual issue: your claim to own my right to liberty.

2. I also told you that I believe in human rights,

But in fact you do not, because all your "arguments" come down to your legal property "rights" having unconditional priority over others' human rights to liberty.

and freedom from slavery is a human right.

So is the right to use what nature provided for all to sustain one's own life. You just prefer to own others' rights to do that, because it legally entitles you to treat them like slaves without all the bother of actually owning them. We already established that. Remember? Here is the proof again:

"During the war I served in a Kentucky regiment in the Federal army. When the war broke out, my father owned sixty slaves. I had not been back to my old Kentucky home for years until a short time ago, when I was met by one of my father's old negroes, who said to me: "Master George, you say you set us free; but before God, I'm worse off than when I belonged to your father." The planters, on the other hand, are contented with the change. They say: "How foolish it was in us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper now than when we owned the slaves." How do they get it cheaper? Why, in the shape of rents they take more of the labor of the negro than they could under slavery, for then they were compelled to return him sufficient food, clothing and medical attendance to keep him well, and were compelled by conscience and public opinion, as well as by law, to keep him when he could no longer work. Now their interest and responsibility cease when they have got all the work out of him they can.

-- From a letter by George M. Jackson, St. Louis, August 15, 1883, as reprinted in Henry George's Social Problems

Further proof is provided by the fact that slaves in the antebellum South enjoyed much better material conditions of life than landless working people in Europe at that time: more food, better clothing and housing, shorter working hours, and longer life expectancy.

There is a very good reason for that. Can you guess what it is?

The material condition of the landless has been indistinguishable from that of slaves in EVERY SINGLE SOCIETY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD where private landowning has been well established but government has not intervened massively -- through welfare, labor standards laws, minimum wages, publicly funded education, pensions and health care, union monopolies, etc. -- to rescue the landless from enslavement by landowners.

It is enshrined by Article 4 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I guess you missed Article 3, where it says everyone has a right to liberty.

I totally oppose it anywhere and everywhere whether legal or not.

No you don't. You insist that private landowners have a right to enslave the landless. Remember?

3. You do not have either a legal right, human right, or any other right to infringe my patent or build your statue in my yard.

I most certainly have a human right to do those things: my natural individual right to liberty. What would stop me but initiation of force by either greedy, evil parasites or government-issued and -enforced privilege?

4. There is a big difference between owning another human being and owning a piece of dirt.

Land is a location on the earth's surface, not "a piece of dirt," and the ONLY difference between owning a slave and owning land is that owning a slave means owning all of one person's rights, while owning land means owning one of all people's rights.

5. You don’t have a legal right to infringe my patent. That is clear. And it not a fundamental human right, either.

It most certainly is, just as it is a fundamental human right to support one's own life using what nature provided for all. What is your patent but a government-issued and -enforced monopoly privilege? Such things never existed in history until a few centuries ago, and everyone had a perfect right to invent, use, produce and sell others' inventions. If they had not, we would still be living in caves, enslaved by greedy, evil parasites.

The consequences do not elevate it to that status, as it does with slavery or murder.

Already refuted. Drug patents HAVE murdered millions of people.

You are free to develop your own drug for the same disease, or market my drug after I have had an opportunity to recoup the $2 billion I invested to bring it to market.

And I would be free to invent, produce, and market "your" patented drug if my natural individual liberty right to do so had not forcibly been stripped from me by government and made over to you as your private property.

6. I believe all people have equal rights under the First Amendment.

Except the rights that you claim legally to own.

However, I don’t believe you or anyone else has a “liberty right” to take or use my property without my consent. You do. That is where we disagree.

<sigh> That "argument" would have applied to chattel slaves in the antebellum South. As I have already informed you many times, any "argument" that would have justified chattel slavery is already known in advance to be fallacious, disingenuous, and evil, with no further argumentation needed.

Yet you keep on making them, over and over again, because you have no other arguments to offer.

If you want to gain even the slightest understanding of these issues, you need to identify a logically consistent set of principles that disallows slavery and other invalid and immoral forms of property but allows valid property rights.

I have done so. Can you?

Since we agree on everything you said about patents,

No we don't. You think patents legally establish a pre-existing right.

we are either BOTH right or BOTH wrong. Logic.

8. I explicitly stated that there is no guarantee I will ever recoup my investment.

No, you claimed a patent was to ensure you did. Remember?

If there are safety risks that didn’t arise in clinical trials, I may have to take it off the market and lose most of my investment and pay damages via class action lawsuit.

Or you can just do what the Sacklers did: have their company distribute to shareholders (them) the billions in profits it made by murdering hundreds of thousands of Americans, and let the company go bankrupt when the victims sue, neatly dodging financial as well as criminal responsibility for the murders they committed by hiding behind their legally created limited liability privilege.

[Puffer Fish]

Or you can just do what the Sacklers did: have their company distribute to shareholders (them) the billions in profits it made by murdering hundreds of thousands of Americans, and let the company go bankrupt when the victims sue, neatly dodging financial as well as criminal responsibility for the murders they committed by hiding behind their legally created limited liability privilege.

This is an issue (an issue of assigning liability and accountability). But you are changing the topic.

Let me point out to you that even if that happened all the time, it would still not be any justification to snatch away corporate patents.

It's obvious you seem to view corporations as an enemy.

[Puffer Fish]

However, I don’t believe you or anyone else has a “liberty right” to take or use my property without my consent. You do. That is where we disagree.

<sigh> That "argument" would have applied to chattel slaves in the antebellum South. As I have already informed you many times, any "argument" that would have justified chattel slavery is already known in advance to be fallacious, disingenuous, and evil, with no further argumentation needed.

If you want to gain even the slightest understanding of these issues, you need to identify a logically consistent set of principles that disallows slavery and other invalid and immoral forms of property but allows valid property rights.

It's true the issue of patent protection is not exactly the same as other property rights.

However, drawing a parallel between patent protection and slavery is more than a stretch. (When we are talking about reasonable patent protection)
Sure, it is theoretically possible to draw some analogy between the two.

But I think the key point is that we should examine the reason why patent protection exists in the first place.

It's based on the assumption (not unreasonable) that if the inventor didn't spend all the effort and money to develop the technology, that the technology would not exist.
That is the major ethical reason behind why patent protection does not last forever.

It is a loose assumption, of course, since we can't be absolutely sure someone else would not have developed it. But it serves a pragmatic economic function.


Let me rephrase this issue in a different light, and ask a hypothetical. If I developed a cure for some terminal medical disease but kept it secret, and was only willing to save the lives of very wealthy people who paid me large amounts of money, should government have the right to force me to divulge the secret and make it public?

[Hakeer]

It's true the issue of patent protection is not exactly the same as other property rights.

However, drawing a parallel between patent protection and slavery is more than a stretch. (When we are talking about reasonable patent protection)
Sure, it is theoretically possible to draw some analogy between the two.

But I think the key point is that we should examine the reason why patent protection exists in the first place.

It's based on the assumption (not unreasonable) that if the inventor didn't spend all the effort and money to develop the technology, that the technology would not exist.
That is the major ethical reason behind why patent protection does not last forever.

It is a loose assumption, of course, since we can't be absolutely sure someone else would not have developed it. But it serves a pragmatic economic function.


Let me rephrase this issue in a different light, and ask a hypothetical. If I developed a cure for some terminal medical disease but kept it secret, and was only willing to save the lives of very wealthy people who paid me large amounts of money, should government have the right to force me to divulge the secret and make it public?

The first thing that would happen is that the government would arrest you attempting to sell a product that requires FDA pre-approval. So, if your objective is to make money from your drug, you will apply for a patent. You will have to disclose the formulation of your drug in your patent application. Once you have your patent, someone who understands marketing will advise you about price points and that you don’t maximize profits by making your product unaffordable to 99% of your potential market. But let’s say you are a marketing idiot and set a price that only very wealthy people can afford. What should the government do? They could negotiate to buy your patent. If that fails, then invoke eminent domain given the obvious an enormous public interest in the product, but I would say you are entitled to financial compensation. Truth to Power would say you are an evil parasite entitled to nothing.

[Truth To Power]

It's true the issue of patent protection is not exactly the same as other property rights.

In fact it is quite different, as there is no natural property in one's knowledge and ideas but secrecy. A physical product of labor is naturally in its producer's hands, and cannot be used by others without depriving the producer of it. That is not the case with knowledge and ideas. People have freely used others' ideas for millions of years. So until a few centuries ago, no one ever considered government-issued monopolies on knowledge to be either rightful or feasible.

However, drawing a parallel between patent protection and slavery is more than a stretch. (When we are talking about reasonable patent protection)

No, you just aren't accustomed to thinking about the issue in terms of valid definitions and consistently defensible principles.

But I think the key point is that we should examine the reason why patent protection exists in the first place.

Correct. There are three main reasons:
1. To encourage innovation -- which, it turns out, patents actually discourage,
2. To prevent loss of technology to secrecy, which patents are reasonably good at, and
3. To enable the rich to extract wealth from the economy without having to contribute anything in return, which patents are really good at.

It's based on the assumption (not unreasonable) that if the inventor didn't spend all the effort and money to develop the technology, that the technology would not exist.

No it isn't. It's based on the factually incorrect notion that granting a monopoly is the most efficient way to encourage such investments. When the US Constitution was written, royal patent monopolies were the default means of rewarding exceptional service to the monarch without having to raise taxes. Adam Smith had only recently demonstrated that such monopolies impoverish society, and the relevant economics was not really understood for several decades. It is now known that in almost all cases, society is far better off paying taxes to fund a prize for development of technology than granting a monopoly of equivalent value to the holder.

That is the major ethical reason behind why patent protection does not last forever.

No, the major ethical reason is that patents are intended to make technology available for use by others. It was known at the time that valuable (especially military) technology had been lost to secrecy. That is why patents are only granted after the technology is divulged, at least to the patent office (military technology may still be kept secret).

It is a loose assumption, of course, since we can't be absolutely sure someone else would not have developed it.

In most cases we can be pretty sure they would, and fairly quickly.

But it serves a pragmatic economic function.

That was the assumption, but it turns out to be false. Patents actually stifle development of technology by impeding its adoption and use. Two historical examples make this fact indisputable:
1. The James Watt 1776 steam engine patent stifled development of steam technology in Britain for a generation, enabling the USA and Germany to get ahead of Britain in steam engines.
2. The Wright brothers' 1903 airplane patent stifled development of aeronautics in the USA for over a decade. By the outbreak of WW I, Britain, France, Germany and Italy were all well ahead of the USA in aircraft technology.

Let me rephrase this issue in a different light, and ask a hypothetical. If I developed a cure for some terminal medical disease but kept it secret, and was only willing to save the lives of very wealthy people who paid me large amounts of money, should government have the right to force me to divulge the secret and make it public?

No. Preventing loss of technology to secrecy was and is a major rationale for the patent system, but there are far more efficient ways to do that without violating people's rights, as well as to encourage research and development of the kind that would normally result in a patent. A system of publicly and privately funded prizes -- both directed prizes like the Longitude Prize, the Kremer Prize and the X Prize, and ex post facto prizes like the Nobels and MacArthur fellowships -- would cost society an order of magnitude less than the patent system, and produce far more prolific development of technology, especially technology that is not patentable.

[Truth To Power]

This is an issue (an issue of assigning liability and accountability). But you are changing the topic.

No, I am pointing out another reason I am right.

Let me point out to you that even if that happened all the time, it would still not be any justification to snatch away corporate patents.

True, there are better justifications for that, like people's rights to liberty. The Sackers' crimes are more of a justification for abolishing corporate limited liability.

It's obvious you seem to view corporations as an enemy.

No, just their privileges, like limited liability.

[Truth To Power]

The first thing that would happen is that the government would arrest you attempting to sell a product that requires FDA pre-approval.

Garbage. Your claims continue to be flat false. Many crackpot and quack remedies are sold without FDA approval, and their purveyors remain at large. Google "homeopathy" and start reading. Try to at least minimally inform yourself of issues before mouthing off, mkay?

Once you have your patent, someone who understands marketing will advise you about price points and that you don’t maximize profits by making your product unaffordable to 99% of your potential market.

Just 95%...

But let’s say you are a marketing idiot and set a price that only very wealthy people can afford.

Or insurance companies? That actually sounds a lot like the marketing departments of big pharma....

What should the government do? They could negotiate to buy your patent.

Or just not issue patents in the first place. What a concept!

If that fails, then invoke eminent domain given the obvious an enormous public interest in the product,

Oh, no you don't. That would violate the owner's property rights, which are absolutely sacred. Remember?

but I would say you are entitled to financial compensation.

You aren't entitled to it, but it might well be in the public interest to reward you appropriately for your contribution.

Truth to Power would say you are an evil parasite entitled to nothing.

You're only an evil parasite entitled to nothing if you bet on evil by owning privileges like land titles, patents, bank licenses, etc. People who bet on evil have placed themselves on the side of evil, against good, and therefore deserve to lose all their money, if not their lives.

[Hakeer]

Garbage. Your claims continue to be flat false. Many crackpot and quack remedies are sold without FDA approval, and their purveyors remain at large. Google "homeopathy" and start reading. Try to at least minimally inform yourself of issues before mouthing off, mkay?

Just 95%...

Or insurance companies? That actually sounds a lot like the marketing departments of big pharma....

Or just not issue patents in the first place. What a concept!

Oh, no you don't. That would violate the owner's property rights, which are absolutely sacred. Remember?

You aren't entitled to it, but it might well be in the public interest to reward you appropriately for your contribution.

You're only an evil parasite entitled to nothing if you bet on evil by owning privileges like land titles, patents, bank licenses, etc. People who bet on evil have placed themselves on the side of evil, against good, and therefore deserve to lose all their money, if not their lives.

You should take your own advice, dipshit. Homeopathic products are under FDA regulation, but do not require clinical trials. The guy would still be required to disclose his “secret” ingredient on the label.

But the hypothetical assumes the guy has a pharmaceutical that CURES something like stage-4 cancer for which there is no other effective treatment. It would almost certainly be a very sophisticated biochemical compound requiring FDA pre-approval.

The rest of this is just your usual diatribe that requires no comment.

[Truth To Power]

You should take your own advice, dipshit.

Oh, dear....

That is such an ill-omened way to start.

Homeopathic products are under FDA regulation,

Just like any other food or drug product intended to go into the human body. I.e., it has to be what it says it is on the label, can't be adulterated, etc. Contrary to your claim, there is absolutely no requirement that such products get "pre-approval," and they in fact do not have any such approval:

"There are currently no homeopathic products approved by FDA."

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-d ... c-products

Yet they are widely available and their purveyors remain at large.

You were saying?

but do not require clinical trials. The guy would still be required to disclose his “secret” ingredient on the label.

But would not, repeat, NOT be required to get FDA "pre-approval," proving you wrong and me right, as usual.

But the hypothetical assumes the guy has a pharmaceutical that CURES something like stage-4 cancer for which there is no other effective treatment. It would almost certainly be a very sophisticated biochemical compound requiring FDA pre-approval.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it is the extract of a South American herb combined with fungal spores and beryllium nitride. The point is, it does not require FDA "pre-approval."

The rest of this is just your usual diatribe that requires no comment.

IOW, you have been comprehensively and conclusively demolished, you know it, and you have no answers. Simple.