From NY Times (h/t Wendy McElroy):

Company Agrees to Share AIDS and Hepatitis Drugs With Patent Pool

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: July 12, 2011

In the first agreement between a pharmaceutical company and the new international Medicines Patent Pool, Gilead Sciences announced Tuesday that it would license four of its AIDS and hepatitis B drugs to the pool.

The move is particularly important because it includes tenofovir and emtricitabine, which have emerged as important components of AIDS therapy and new prophylaxis regimens, like vaginal microbicides for women and once-a-day pills protecting gay men. Many poor countries now have only older drugs, some of which have harsh side effects.

Health advocates have long championed the idea of a pool: an independent agency that would hold patents on drugs and sub-license them to low-cost manufacturers for low or no royalties on the condition that they supply only poor countries. (In Uganda, above, cost cutting has set back anti-AIDS programs.)

The pool was created last year, but drugmakers resisted it, wanting to control quality and protect rights to future profits from middle-income countries. Until this week, the only participant was the National Institutes of Health, which turned over a partial patent on an obscure AIDS drug.

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From Prometheus Unbound’s post NEWS ROUNDUP | Trek Socialism, SF Encyclopedia Online, Innovations in Publishing,

• Angry Robot Books, the British-based global science fiction and fantasy publisher, recentlyannounced a Netflix/Audible-like subscription model. Purchase a 12-month subscription to Angry Robot titles and you will receive an ebook (in epub format) for every book they publish in that time period, which will be a minimum of 24 ebooks, at a one-time price of £69.00. Follow the second link for more information.
• Kristin Butler over at Brain Pickings has an interesting article about “7 Platforms Changing the Future of Publishing.”

IP continues to draw ever more scrutiny. And no wonder; in the Internet age IP law wreaks more and more havoc. I doubt this book will contain any libertarian, principled perspectives on IP, but you can see a growing concern and skepticism. (H/t Mark Thornton)

Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property

Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective

Edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee

480 pages | 39 halftones, 3 line drawings, 7 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2011

Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in “intellectual property” has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics ranging from traditional knowledge to international trade. Though recognition of the central role played by “knowledge economies” has increased, there is a special urgency associated with present-day inquiries into where rights to information come from, how they are justified, and the ways in which they are deployed.

Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, presents a range of diverse—and even conflicting—contemporary perspectives on intellectual property rights and the contested sources of authority associated with them. Examining fundamental concepts and challenging conventional narratives—including those centered around authorship, invention, and the public domain—this book provides a rich introduction to an important intersection of law, culture, and material production.

[continue reading…]

Luke Burrage, a professional juggler (but hey, aren’t we all?), does one of my favorite podcasts, The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. His Episode 100, “Science Fiction and Personal Philosophy,” is fascinating–he explains many of his career choices and approaches to life and creativity. He has a long and rambling but interesting discussion–first thirty minutes or so–where he uses the metaphor of how his love of sci-fi and imaginative personal fantasies of time traveling to the past helps explain how he deals with living now. It sounds odd at first but if you get into it, it’s quite interesting. Basically he talks about how if he were transported to some primitive society somehow (time travel; alternate universe; goes into cold sleep and awakens in a future dystopian primitive society), it at first would seem that the advanced knowledge he has would help him to become like a god; or, if he were say put down 50 years ago, to know the trends that are coming — culturally, scientifically, etc.–and to win nobel prizes or fame and fortune. But then he shoots holes in all this and makes a good point that knowledge of this type is not enough. You would not know how to make a TV or transistor (unless you happened to be an expert in that) just because you know about them. You might know DNA is a double helix but would not be able to explain much more beyond this, or prove it. Etc. At most if you lived in the past then you would be a future guy living in the past, and maybe on occasion the extra information you have would come in handy or make you somewhat unique. His point is that he accumulates information now, in the real world, he is in a similar situation–not much different than some future man living among us. And that we ought to always accumulate knowledge and skills and be prepared to use them when the opportunity arises. He goes into a lot about serendipity and helping create your own luck and his ambitions in his career. The part I noted as relevant to IP and information is his implicit if not explicit recognition that good ideas are not enough; you need to execute and be prepared to execute. That is a point many critics of IP have noted, when they rebut claims that we need ownership of ideas, on the grounds that ideas are cheap and easy, and not what you need for success anyway. (BTW Luke’s use of the term “intellectual property” does not, I think, mean patent and copyright, but is just an informal usage common among businessmen to refer to successful ideas, reputation, skills, know-how, etc.)

“A Generation of Software Patents,” by James E. Bessen
Research on Innovation; Boston University – School of Law
June 21, 2011
Boston Univ. School of Law, Law and Economics Research Paper No. 11-31
Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2011-04

Abstract:
This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry.

Related:

• Price Controls, Antitrust, and Patents (July 2011)
• Antitrust vs. Trademark Law (June 2011)
• The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC (Aug. 2006)
• IP vs. Antitrust (Sept. 2005)
• The Microsoft-Apple Gesture Oligopoly
• Controls breed controls, Monopolies breed monopolies

Some older posts on when price controls and antitrust law are almost tolerable:

Patents, Prescription Drugs, and Price Controls

From an older Mises blog post:

Great piece by Nina Paley:

Culture is Anti-Rivalrous

Economists talk about rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods, but Culture is neither rivalrous, nor non-rivalrous; it is anti-rivalrous.

I. Rivalrous

Rivalrous goods diminish in value the more they are used. For example, a bicycle: if I use it, it gets me from here to there, if you use it, it gets me nowhere. If I acquire your bicycle, you don’t have it any more. Only one of us can have the bicycle at one time. We can share it to a limited extent, but the more it’s used the less it’s worth; it gets dinged up and wears out. The more people use the bicycle, the less utility it has.

If I steal your bicycle, you have to take the bus

All material things – things made of atoms – are rivalrous, because an object cannot be in two places at the same time. Everything in the physical world is rivalrous, even if it’s abundant.

A commons is a rivalrous good. Hence the “tragedy of the commons“: the more people use a square of land, the less valuable it is to each of them. The grass gets eaten too fast to grow back, the soil can’t handle the incoming rate of sheep shit, and degradation ensues. [continue reading…]

Fantastic insights in this Business Insider piece:

Your Start-Up Isn’t Unique, But That Doesn’t Matter 

Adam Ludwin, RRE Ventures

I’m a huge fan of Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix series.  If you haven’t watched the first three installments, you can (and should) do so here.The series lays out the persuasive case that big, important breakthroughs in science and technology are emergent phenomenon.  That is, they arise organically out of our collective, cumulative knowledge.  An “invention” is simply a historically demarcated tipping point on a continuous path of progress.

Fittingly, Furguson isn’t the first to point this out.

Henry Ford said:

Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

And long before Ford, the 18^th century mathematician Farkas Bolyai vividly observed:

When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.

One of the remarkable implications of this theory of invention is that it de-emphasizes the individual innovator.  Not only are notable inventors standing on the shoulders of those who came before, but even their particular contributions are often made by others simultaneously:  Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray patented the telephone on the same day; Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently advanced a theory of evolution; and Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and others have all been credited with inventing calculus.

Read more>>

Great IP-related insights in Jeff Tucker’s article Show Love to the Merchant Class:

Then there’s the competition. Anyone is free to copy and replicate your successes. The more you succeed, the more you inspire imitators who are pleased to do exactly what you do but somehow manage to do it at a lower price. This means that you must constantly stay on your toes and innovate. At the same time, you have to constantly watch your back. A bad day of sales could mean nothing or it could mean everything. It could be a bump on the road to glory or the foreshadowing of disaster. There’s no way to know for sure.

Mike Masnick highlights a great post:

Debunking Some Big Myths About Patents

from the stop-using-these-arguments dept

Rick Falkvinge recently put together an excellent post debunking ten of the common myths you hear about patents. Here’s a taste:

Myth 2: Patents drive innovation.

Fact: Patents do not drive innovation, they ban innovation. A patent is, by its very definition, something that bans the entire world except the patent holder from building and improving on a particular innovative step. If patents are driving innovation, which is claimed, then this outright ban must be shown to have side effects that somehow drive innovation to a larger extent than the extent to which the direct ban destroys it. No such side effects have turned out to exist.

To the contrary, patents are being used by incumbent industries to shut down disruptive competition. Rather than competing with better products and services, the current kings-of-the-hill are finding it more cost efficient competing with more expensive lawyers. This does neither drive innovation nor a healthy competitive market.

Other myths debunked are claims that investors won’t invest without patents, that patents are a useful measure of innovation, that the problem is just with patent trolls, that patents disclose innovation, and a few others as well. It’s really a fantastic read. It likely won’t change the minds of patent system supporters, but for anyone involved in these debates, it’s a very straightforward and clear debunking of many of the common myths about the importance of the patent system.

Update: Mark Lemley: The Very Basis Of Our Patent System… Is A Myth

Great cartoon from Nerfnow mocking the idea of intellectual property: