Firm wielding Theranos patents asks judge to block coronavirus test

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.

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.

That's theory and an outdated dream.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

I truly wonder how many patents issued in the past twenty-thirty years, would stand up to _any_ amount of actual scrutiny.

I'd say there's a LOT of justified hate for the way the USPTO is operating.

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.

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.

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.

We need MASSIVE patent reform and to put a end to patent trolls like the one in the story

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.

"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.

Solves both problems.

And that is precisely what these people are after by making the offer — if others in the industry are willing to take licenses under a patent, then the patent owner can brandish that fact as indirect evidence of the patent's supposed validity.

That kind of evidence wouldn't be dispositive by any means. At trial, though, litigation counsel will put in any evidence they can — especially "proxy" evidence that can readily be understood by non-technical people such as judges and jurors. (A classic example of such proxy evidence is, "They lied!")

(Patent attorney here, although I don't do that kind of work anymore.)

FTFY.

Who decides what's immoral? Not too long ago, interracial dating was also considered "immoral" by plenty of people. Plenty of injustice was perpetrated by pushing moral agendas.

I frankly think it's crazy to be so ready to lynch others for working within robust systems that evolved over centuries because these systems sometimes violate their personal sensibilities. These systems have their own (evolving) standards of ethics, and unless you understand them and the reason they exist, don't be so quick to cast aspersions.