Posted on 05/31/2013 8:44:34 AM PDT by opentalk
- A strain of genetically modified wheat found in the United States fuelled concerns over food supplies across Asia on Thursday, with major importer Japan cancelling a tender offer to buy U.S. grain.
Other top Asian wheat importers South Korea, China and the Philippines said they were closely monitoring the situation after the U.S. government found genetically engineered wheat sprouting on a farm in the state of Oregon.
The strain was never approved for sale or consumption.
Asian consumers are keenly sensitive to gene-altered food, with few countries allowing imports of such cereals for human consumption. However, most of the corn and soybean shipped from the U.S. and South America for animal feed is genetically modified.
"We will refrain from buying western white and feed wheat effective today," Toru Hisadome, a Japanese farm ministry official in charge of wheat trading, told Reuters
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.reuters.com ...
‘cuz companies are gonna spend Billions of their own money developing medicines that they can’t profit from?
Sounds like Monsanto might be on board with Agenda 21 - terminating humans in favor of unkillable plants.
Go to any convenience store and you will see at least five different brands of aspirin. You don't need IP to make a profit. Heck you can see five different brands of water No one's ever had a patent on that.
Huh? The US has never not had patents. ARTICLE I, SECTION 8, CLAUSE 8 of the Constitution. Patent approval and FDA approval are not the same thing.
Not to be argumentative, but take a look at US patent # 644,077.
Zing pow~
The constitution doesn't create or mandate a patent system. It only authorizes Congress to do so, if it chooses to. At first the range of patentable inventions was a lot narrower than it is now. Drugs were not always marketed under patent protection. The push to make drugs patentable came mostly from the makers of quack medicines.
You know that patent expired decades ago right? My point still stands. BTW, that patent was originally issued to a German company, but was then expropriated as a reparation for WWI.
Here’s a great piece on the history of pharmaceutical patents
http://www.lloydlibrary.org/scholar/Patents%20-%20V8%20-%20I1.pdf
And it points to Thalidomide as the reason compulsory licensing via the FDA was passed.
Patents are not the problem.
In return for the inventor being granted a period of exclusivity, the public receives the long term benefit of the product or process.
Meanwhile, there are Americans who still oppose flouride in water
Your argument presupposes that without a patent no one would invent anything. I’d be interested in seeing a proof of that.
There are counter examples. For instance, the fashion industry has no patents or copyrights. There are trademarks, but I can copy your design exactly as long as I don’t put your name on it.
The fact is that the growth of bio-tech and similar industries has occurred in countries which protected intellectual property. It coulda all been a coincidence.
Yep. Or it could have been diversion of resources from other more efficient uses. Through enough money at anything and sooner or later you'll make a pile of something.
Although the first patents for medical devices and medicines were not recorded in the United States until 1796, the true formation of the modern industry did not begin until the middle of the 19th century. 3 Early manufacturers depended on innovation in manufacturing rather than the discovery of new medicines to grow their businesses. Leaders of the period, such as Edward Robinson Squibb, chose not to patent their innovations; and one firm quickly copied the successes of another. However, the industry was relatively small, with most manufacturers provid- ing a full line of specialty products and items that pharmacists used in their compounding practices, with the distinction be- ing the eponymous name of the owner, such as Squibb, Lilly or Abbott, guaranteeing quality.Those companies survived and prospered until the twentieth century. They are gone now, despite having had patent protections.
Patent protection wasn’t as beneficial in an era of slow transportation and even slower transmittal of information.
Things have changed.
And read the whole thing. We didn’t have squat and Germany dominated the industry until a global conflagration changed things.
I don’t think limited IP protection is a bad thing.
So slower dissemination of information is good? Lets turn off the Internet then.
I don’t think limited IP protection is a bad thing.
See there's the thing that really stands out as unsupportable to me. If IP is a good thing then why must it be limited? And how do you decide how long the patent term should be? Drug patents were three years. Then they were raised to ten years during Clinton's term, as a favor for a really big campaign donation. Then Bush got Congress to raise them to thirty years, also as a quid pro quo for campaign donations. So tell me how long a drug patent should be if it's going to be limited just to the point of being "good".
Not sure how you got that. Difficulty of transportation and slower diffusion of ideas lessens the value of IP protection because if you have a great idea and produce a product in your corner of the globe, you will NOT have competition from China any time soon. Those same conditions make enforcement of IP protection so expensive as to be prohibitive.
It just wasn't needful.
Limited IP protection is a good thing because it encourages people to innovate in order to claim the benefits of that golden time of monopoly. Just because a little of something is good, doesn't mean more is better. Eventually you cross some line of balance and get a paradoxical effect.
You've begged the question. If there is a line then where is it? How do you know three year drug patents were wrong and thirty year patents are right? Remember the thirty year term was bough by the Pharmaceuticals industry with campaign contributions. So what's the formula? How long is long enough? Why can't you say?
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