September 25, 2006
Patenting gone wrong
Patenting is good, right? I mean, most anyone who has taken a basic economics class has been through the argument that explains how the royalties received on a patent act as an incentive for the development or creation of a new product/method/whatever. Of course, we have all probably also heard of some of the downsides of patents - anti-retroviral drugs aren't viable as a method of preventing the advancement of HIV in Africa, because the patented drugs come with an astronomical price-tag.
ok, so patents act as incentives for the development of new things, but the prices of said patented products vastly limit the spread of the products. what's more important?
how about your thoughts? does it sound ridiculous that you could be sued for just thinking about something? well, this matter, and a number of other thought-provoking issues - are being considered by the Supreme Court. Read one author's (you might have heard of Michael Crichton, he wrote that really famous movie about dinosaurs...) opnion on the notion of patenting the biological relationship between a medical condition and vitamin deficiency (absurd) and the future of a patent system gone wrong (very absurd):
This Essay Breaks the Law
Posted by lara at September 25, 2006 12:39 PM
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