Non-Indians have benefited most from patent regime in India | Hacker News Reader

Non-Indians have benefited most from patent regime in India

thehindu.com

56 pointsrealrocker18 comments

It is a strange fact that government grants and enforces monopolies on molecules that are designed to save lives, monopolies which then lowers the supply. One would naively think that society enforcement arms would prefer that sick people had access to medicine, rather than erect pay wall barriers that dooms some poor people to a slow and painful death.

I wonder what the majority of the Indian people would prefer. What percentage of citizens of the Republic of India can actually afford the products of companies like Novartis AG when they demand patent licenses, and how much taxes would be free up by abolishing the patent office and patent enforcement?

It is a strange fact that government grants and enforces monopolies on molecules that are designed to save lives, monopolies which then lowers the supply.

This is a simplistic view. After the molecule was discovered, the patent certainly lowers the supply, but if the patent is what enables the molecule to be discovered in the first place, then it actually increases the supply.

Of course, whether the claim holds is questionable, but it's not like these drugs where flowing from the trees until the bad government came and limited it.

As for the taxes, I don't know the Indian patent office, but the US counterpart makes money.

By the time the patent application is being sought, the invention is already made. As such, the patent is only there to encourage more inventions. The question is then, should a democratic countrey give out such monopolies, while knowing the harm it will do to a majority population that won't gain any benefit for 20 years, for a maybe increase in new inventions?

Or to put it in concert fashion, should a farmer sacrifice a family member to a sickness today, just so he might be able in 20+ years buy a generic version when the price has gone down? If put to a vote, would the majorly of the citizen inside a country vote to vow never allow anyone die just because they are too poor to pay the medicine, or do they rather want the chance of increased new medicines which only a small minority can afford in the next 20+ years?

What would the democratic vote say? My bet would be on the living and not on the patents.

I'm not a huge fan of patents for many cases, but drug patents are something I support. Don't forget that while someone might die today from not having the drug, more people may die in the future because it's not worthwhile for a company to invent new drugs without patent protection. We can debate what is fair patent protection for drugs, but protection is essential. It's easy to see a drug that exists and ignore all that went into making it, and also easy to ignore the drugs that will never be invented because they're not worthwhile to make. It's also deadly.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2005/10/if_france_gets_its_wa...

And getting mad at Novartis in this case for "evergreening" also isn't entirely fair, because up until 2003/5 India was the wild west when it came to drugs, and thus Novartis couldn't really sell it there anyway. If India had product patents when Gleevec was invented in 1995, maybe they would be on course to have the generic soon. Instead, the rest of the world is subsidizing cheap drugs for India. We invent, we pay, they benefit.

While someone might die tomorrow for lack of medicine not invented yet, someone will die today for not being able to buy the patent licensed medicine. While it might be deadly not to provide that incentive for invention, question does lay if its moral to let people die today, just so some other people might not die tomorrow.

Of course, evergreening is an extra evil in itself, and lets not forget that pharma also get a extra special monopoly after the patent has expired just for doing drug trials.

Tell you what. Let us enumerate the number of new advanced drugs that Non-Indians brought to India. That list will be long; the worst part is that all those technical drug lists may turn out to have at least one Indian working on them, our emigration is huge. To take a technical comparison, what would have happened if Satya Nadella & Sundar Pichai had stayed back over here? Anyway, that's an argument for another day.

To get back to the topic, Non-Indians may benefit from the patent regime; but they got the products here in the first place. In short, the "refutation" is a simple quid pro quo: the foreigners manufacture most drugs, and they get the most patents. There is no argument here on whether patents are bad, it is a stupid defense of an idiotic method of patent grants. Most Indian pharma firms have no meaningful R&D, they make their profits on generics. Socialists like the present government will never understand a free market, if they want these expensive drugs for free, they have to pay for them somehow. Not by abusing a bad patent system which is protectionist. Either they should abolish patents (which is the best way) and take the results, or they start applying patents the ostensible way they are meant to be applied, which is to pay attention to whether the pharma breakthrough is big enough to merit a patent, or not.

"Socialists like the present government will never understand a free market, if they want these expensive drugs for free, they have to pay for them somehow."

Can you substantiate your claim that the present government in India is socialist and that they don't understand free markets?

Also, the article does not talk about free drugs?

Ahh, to live in a free society, where men and woman can own their ideas and stop all others from thinking and acting on similar lines. What liberty we enjoy. How free we are. We own matter, energy and land, yet we can't use them in the manner we see fit, for we may infringe on someone's "intellectual property". We may think thoughts others have thought before, and what an awful theft that would be. Why, For the market to function, the government must grant monopolies on ideas. In general government granted monopolies are bad, but in this particular case...

That's an odd reply to a post that says "they should abolish patents (which is the best way)".

I was agreeing with him with a bit of sarcasm, but it does seem (looking at it) that I was replying to him with sarcasm. I apologize. Patents make me so angry my brain deactivates.

Alternatively they should ban drug marketing which eats up the lion's share of the budget, thereby reducing the cost of producing the drugs. Not to mention that there are other social factors such as imperialism that ended only 70 years ago. Indian firms should have huge R&D budgets and in order to get those budgets investors must see a potential return on their investments. In order for that to happen the Indian economy must grow and there should be more income with which Indians can pay for those drugs. In order for the economy to grow more money must be kept in the country and not allowed to be siphoned off by foreign companies. Indians have obviously benefited from foreign inventions, but then so have foreigners benefited from immigrants responsible for many of those inventions.

Indian firms should have huge R&D budgets and in order to get those budgets investors must see a potential return on their investments. (...) In order for the economy to grow more money must be kept in the country and not allowed to be siphoned off by foreign companies.

How are you to attract foreign investment, if you limit the returns that leave the country?

With promises of greater returns in the future. It does not necessarily mean you take the money out of private hands, only that they can't take the money out of the country for a certain number of years or until certain economic benchmarks change.

Although I agree with you that the premise of their defense is rather nonsensical, in this particular case (Novartis/Glivec) it was no socialistic move of policy but rather a prudent decision in clear-cut evergreening. This[1] columnist elaborates it very well, explaining how popular perception of the event is wrong on both sides.

[1] http://swaminomics.org/west-should-learn-from-indias-high-pa...

As the OP has mentioned, this is the Indian government's response to Novartis. Here is the background:

1. In April, India's Supreme Court denied Novartis' patent application for its cancer drug Glivec. They reasoned that Novartis was "evergreening" the drug, and thus did not deserve a patent for a new drug - http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-04-02/news...

2. Novartis complained, naturally - http://www.novartis.com/newsroom/media-releases/en/2013/1689...

[Edited: a couple of typos]

It makes me uncomfortable. It feels racist against non-Indians people. The same go with these posts make a difference between US and non-US citizen for privacy stuff.

This a response to a letter written by Norvatis accusing Government of India of discrimination towards Non-Indians.

As realrocker said, this is only a reply to Novartis, after they failed to apply evergreening. It was a major pro-poor victory. If I remember correctly, it brought down the cost of Tuberclosis drug from Rs 10k to 350 Rupees only (I think that figure was per week/month maybe)

Nevertheless, indeed non-Indians have benefited (no offense) but that is due to people in India, specially Entrepreneurs waking up late to importance of IP.

Just Yesterday, I was attending the NASSCOM EMERGENCE CONCLAVE, where Founder of Naukri.com (India's biggest job portal) was speaking.

He revealed that it was Naukri.com FOUNDERS who first digitally collected trademark data in India, in 1989, which was about 80,000 applications, the biggest share out of total 6 lakh pending applications. They sent it to each pharmaceutical company, and made a huge profit out of it. Prior to founding Naukri.com

Though we are talking about patents here, that reference gives us a pretty good idea about the situation in India, in 1990s, when most of IP data was still in fat registers. He hired around 7-8 young college goers at intern prices, had them skip classes, and in 3 weeks collected two big bags full of registers. Which they then put throw a computer they got to use (pre pentium generation) from 10 pm to 4 am.

Today, the pending copyright applications stand at 14 lakh

1 lakh = 100,000 : For quick reference.

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