Dave wrote:

At one time I believe the PTO actually required the
inventor to send it a working model. No more. I believe the inventor must
persuade the examiner that if the device were produced in accordance with
the specifications it would do what the inventor claims it would.


I believe that is correct Dave. BTW what do you think of the idea of patenting a drug for treating a specific disease and then later on finding
another disease to treat with the same drug, and as result being able to extend the original patent?

Cheers
Marty

Horass gets turned on when men talk about laying.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Horvath" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 07:54:01 -0400, "Vito" wrote
this crap:
The Congress shall have Power To lay

In article ,
Dave wrote:
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 08:15:18 -0700, "Jonathan Ganz"
said:

Go **** yourself Mr. Poodle.

More reasoned argument, eh. Given up on showing us your knowledge of the
law, Jon?

I was just quoting Dick Cheney. Given up being intelligent? No. You
started that way.



--
Jonathan Ganz (j gan z @ $ail no w.c=o=m)
http://www.sailnow.com
"If there's no wind, row."

In article ,
Dave wrote:

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 11:15:44 +1100, Peter Wiley
said:

Not quite correct - whether it would be economically possible to
reverse-engineer. I run a marine engineering R&D section, in essence. I
have engineers, programmers, a complete electronics lab & heavy
engineering ability. We can build a lot of stuff, but if it's cheaper
to buy, we buy. Now, if all the gear we use was protected by patents
and we couldn't build our own, we wouldn't have that option.

Maybe yes, maybe no. What you mean is that you couldn't build your own if
you weren't willing to pay the inventor your share of what he thinks is the
value of the work he did in inventing the product.

No, I couldn't build my own if the patent owner wouldn't license me to
do so. Alternatively if the company was selling items for $100K and
wanted a one-off fee of $200K then in effect they've prevented me from
building my own by rendering it economically foolish to do so. I tmight
only cost me ssay $20K in time/materials to build the item myself.

Been there done that except with unpatented equipment. Got a quote for
$250K and the manufacturer wouldn't release the source code even on a
non-disclosure basis. Wanted us to buy a pig in a poke in essence. We
built our own, including 2000m depth rated pressure vessels &
electronics, wrote our own software. If I get really bored one day I'll
write it all up for a marine research engineering journal and release
the specs & code into the public domain.

As I said, with drugs it gets tricky due to the number of failures to
successes. There does need to be an incentive to innovate. Perhaps a
different reward model is needed. Say for starters, 100X the cost of
all work done to achieve a success plus a percentage royalty on sales,
with open licensing to any manufacturer with the QA needed to produce.
Then manufacturers could compete on their production systems and R&D
firms would make money. Separate the 2 in other words.

Bad idea. Administered prices are inherently inefficient in the longer run.
This would be just another case of administered prices.

Huh? What administered pricing system? You're dragging in a red
herring. I said nothing about price controls of any kind.

I note that you have nothing to say WRT innovation happening regardless
of patents or protection of IP in software. I take that as an
acknowledgement that I am correct and that you are incorrect.

No question about that. One of my former patent partners estimated that 50%
of the patents issued are invalid.

Giving more people a moral justification for ignoring them.

Not the way it works in the real world. Most businesses don't honor or
ignore patents on the basis that doing so is moral or immoral. In fact
patents is one of those areas of the law where morality has very little
place. It isn't immoral to infringe a patent or trademark. But it may be
costly.

Quite true. However, while companies have no sense of morality, most
people do. Also technology drives business practices. Once again I
refer to software where the cost of duplication is so small as to be
insignificant. Ditto music and soon movies as bandwidth increases.
Already organisations like Encyclopaedia Britannica have either changed
business models or gone out of business.

It may well be that patent law and copyright law become unenforceable
in practice, for whole classes of product.

PDW

In article ,
wrote:
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:22:26 +1100, Peter Wiley
wrote:
Dave is making it up as he goes along. Either that, or he's the most incompetent
lawyer on the planet. He believes Bush, which gives you some idea of how easy it
is to spoon feed him nonsense and have him take it to heart.

A patent is no guarantee that someone else won't take your IDEA and use it as if
it was their own. All it does is give you legal standing to spend thousands or
millions of dollars defending it. If you don't have thousands or millions at
your disposal to spend defending your patent, tough luck, bub.

Quite true. I happen to know from experience that holding a patent is
not going to stop someone from using your idea.



--
Jonathan Ganz (j gan z @ $ail no w.c=o=m)
http://www.sailnow.com
"If there's no wind, row."

In article ,
Dave wrote:

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:22:26 +1100, Peter Wiley
said:


Then manufacturers could compete on their production systems and R&D
firms would make money. Separate the 2 in other words.

Bad idea. Administered prices are inherently inefficient in the longer run.
This would be just another case of administered prices.

Huh? What administered pricing system? You're dragging in a red
herring. I said nothing about price controls of any kind.

What you said was:

Say for starters, 100X the cost of
all work done to achieve a success plus a percentage royalty on sales,
with open licensing to any manufacturer with the QA needed to produce.

Who would set that 100 number, and who would fix that percentage? If you say
the licensor and licensee, the answer is that they're free to do that now.
If it's the licensor and licensee, you've got administered prices in one
form or another.

Sigh. You really do have a failure of the imagination, don't you?

There are 2 payment methods possible for drugs that occur to me. First,
let's address the argument that the hit rate is so low that cost of
failures needs to be loaded onto the few successes. Agreed. Now, how to
pay for that? One method is to reimburse the entire cost of R&D at some
multiple that covers the cost of the failures, plus a healthy profit.
You now have your R&D money back, plus some.

Second, ongoing revenue streams. For simplicity, assume that licensing
production to manufacturers who meet QA standards is both mandatory and
that the percentage of wholesale price paid as a royalty is fixed so
you can't charge one manufacturer more than another one. Now,
manufacturers can produce the drug using the most efficient processes
they know and sell into a competitive market against other
manufacturers. If Company A produces & wholesales for $10/unit, the
discoverer gets $10/x payment. If manufacturer B produces & wholesales
for $5/unit, the discoverer gets $5/x payment. Remember they've already
got their R&D money back plus profit.

As I said I fail to see the price maintenance over & above the minimum
needed to pay the margin and hell, if a company wanted to give drugs
away for free, the payment would be nothing. I can hear your screams
now....

I note that you have nothing to say WRT innovation happening regardless
of patents or protection of IP in software. I take that as an
acknowledgement that I am correct and that you are incorrect.

That's what we call a non-sequitur. I simply didn't comment on the issue
one way or the other.

As to whether innovation would occur without patent protection, the answer
is undoubtedly yes, to some extent, particularly where there is related
proprietary know-how, but probably not as quickly. Money is a powerful
motivator.

Hmmm, explains why MS Windows is a superior o/s to linux. Money is a
powerful motivator, true, but this does not necessarily translate into
a better or more efficient product. Especially in software..... I've
worked for s/ware firms who were very good on their engineering &
testing - my last employer in the USA was such a firm. I've also worked
for the other type where one way of making money was cutting costs,
corners and everything else to get product out the door.

Had I commented on software protection, I might have suggested among other
things that the market share of Open Office is miniscule, and even
development in that area is driven in substantial part by the demand for
programs protected by copyright.

Fail to see the relevance. The demand for MS Office is set partially by
Microsoft's proprietary and changing document storage formats. Their
market share is slowly eroding. Now if they had been able to patent the
idea of a word processor........

Anyway, patents are a Govt sponsored/enforced restaint of trade from
which the public is supposed to derive a benefit that outweighs the
loss. It's getting debateable if the benefit is commensurate with the
loss from the restraint in a number of areas. If company A can
manufacture/sell a drug for $10/tab and company B does the same thing
for $75/tab, I'm willing to bet that A is still making a profit and B
is making its sales only by suppressing competition from A. As a
practical matter this can't last. You can argue all you like, but just
as the music industry is being dragged kicking & screaming by
technology they can't control into a future they don't want, other
industries will be as well.

Boring now.......

PDW

Dave wrote:
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 11:15:55 -0400, Martin Baxter said:


I believe that is correct Dave. BTW what do you think of the idea of patenting a drug for treating a specific disease and then later on finding
another disease to treat with the same drug, and as result being able to extend the original patent?


I don't have any problem with that in principle. The policy question is
whether the financial incentive is necessary or appropriate to encourage
inventors to develop the use of old drugs for new applications.

Dave

In principal it appears sound, however it hasn't really worked that way. Instead it has led to the creation of fictional syndromes. In the psychiatric
field, make up a new disease (irrational fear of menstrual cramps is one), give it a nice latin name, get a couple of crackpot shrinks to include it
in the index and Bob's your uncle! Presto, another few years to gouge the public.

I would have much less of a problem with pharmaceutical companies if they didn't spend more, much more, on advertising than they do on R&D.

Cheers
Marty

I agree with you on the advertising thing....I had a discussion with several
docs who are quite frustrated when people come in demanding the newest,
latest drug advertised on the television. What they don't listen to is the
side effects or the disclaimers. This drives the price of health care up.
Rather than take a medicine that is more suitable, and mist likely generic,
they insist on the newer medication at the higher price...the insurance
company, then, is left with the balance after the co-pay....and we wonder
why prescription riders are so high?
"Martin Baxter" wrote in message
...
Dave wrote:
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 11:15:55 -0400, Martin Baxter said:


I believe that is correct Dave. BTW what do you think of the idea of
patenting a drug for treating a specific disease and then later on
finding another disease to treat with the same drug, and as result being
able to extend the original patent?


I don't have any problem with that in principle. The policy question is
whether the financial incentive is necessary or appropriate to encourage
inventors to develop the use of old drugs for new applications. Dave

In principal it appears sound, however it hasn't really worked that way.
Instead it has led to the creation of fictional syndromes. In the
psychiatric field, make up a new disease (irrational fear of menstrual
cramps is one), give it a nice latin name, get a couple of crackpot
shrinks to include it in the index and Bob's your uncle! Presto, another
few years to gouge the public.

I would have much less of a problem with pharmaceutical companies if they
didn't spend more, much more, on advertising than they do on R&D.

Cheers
Marty

"katysails" wrote in message

I agree with you on the advertising thing....I had a discussion with
several docs who are quite frustrated when people come in demanding the
newest, latest drug advertised on the television. What they don't listen
to is the side effects or the disclaimers. This drives the price of health
care up. Rather than take a medicine that is more suitable, and mist likely
generic, they insist on the newer medication at the higher price...the
insurance company, then, is left with the balance after the co-pay....and
we wonder why prescription riders are so high?

There is something that doesn't figure with this argument. I have no
problem whatever steering patients to a more appropriate medication. If the
physicians to whom you spoke can't affect a similar outcome, they don't have
the confidence of their patients. Advertising never plays a role in the
final decision my patients and I ultimately make. Initially they may
*think* they have the answer, but they trust me to set them straight if that
info is false or inappropriate.

The primary reason medications and Rx riders are so high has far more to do
with governmental intervention (the generic drug law, for starters) than
with advertising.

Max

Dave wrote:
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 06:38:21 -0400, Martin Baxter said:


I would have much less of a problem with pharmaceutical companies if they didn't spend more, much more, on advertising than they do on R&D.


Ah those silly irrational business people who think their job is making a
profit instead of doing good deeds.



Yup, those same irrational hypocritical folks who proffer ad campaigns extolling the virtues of their companies and what a standup job they are doing
for mankind. A little honesty would go a long way, "We are not here to find a cure for _(insert your favourite disease)_, we're to pry as much money
out your and your insurance company's wallets with the least investment in R&D that we can get away with, the bottom line is the only line!".

Cheers
Marty