Today Commons Network publishes a new policy paper that takes on the pharmaceutical system and presents real alternatives, based on open source research and the knowledge commons. Commons Network proposes a new vision for the biomedical research system that safeguards universal access to affordable medicines and scientific advances.

Taking the commons perspective allows us to offer a diagnostic of our biomedical innovation system and to put forth a political programme for a transition to a new public interest model. The EU’s market-dominated pharmaceutical policies are sized up from the ‘outside the box’ viewpoint of the common good.

This paper responds to the questions: How does the present pharma model work in Europe, what is wrong with it and what can be done right now to change it. This includes a comparison between the existing model, positive transitions and the transformative commons model with practical examples, principles and outcomes.

The paper also describes a broken pharmaceutical system, that in its current form prevents millions of people in Europe and around the world from getting the medicines they need. It goes on to show how ‘Big Pharma’ creates artificial scarcity by enclosing scientific knowledge resources which could easily be abundant and universally accessible.

The skyrocketing prices of medicines and the lack of affordable access to treatments are key traits of our pharmaceutical system. We are told there are no alternatives. This is not the case. There are alternatives to the current broken pharmaceutical innovation system that do not thrive on high prices nor the privatization of knowledge. Some of these alternatives are already in place on a small scale. Yet policy will have to support a transformation of the entire system for it to be sustainable, efficient and just.

The of medical treatments and knowledge based on patent monopolies, regulatory capture and unfair trade rules means a ‘tragedy of the anti-commons’ where over-medication and under-treatment are two sides of the same coin.

The solution to this conundrum of problems is to unleash the potential of the commons. In short: let’s commonify health-care treatments. We have to unlock the gates around medical knowledge and allow it to be governed democratically both by scientists and citizens as a whole.

This new paper by Commons Network presents the commons approach to biomedical innovation at a time when a new comprehensive approach is so direly needed. The biomedical commons represents a paradigm based on the sharing of knowledge, cooperation, stewardship, participation and social equity.

You can download the summary here,

Or you can read the entire paper embedded in Commons Network’s website.

For more information or collaborations please contact Sophie Bloemen at [email protected] or [email protected]

Photo by mag3737

The post From Lab to Commons: Shifting to a Biomedical System that’s in the Public Interest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Christian Villum: Giants such as Google and IBM have lately been followed by Canadian D-Wave, the leading developer of quantum computers, which opened up parts of their platform in January. But it’s not just the large, financially strong American technology companies who are painting the picture of open source as a global megatrend. Start-ups and small to medium-sized companies all over the world, and not just within the tech industry, are creating new and exciting open source-based physical products. 3D Robotics, Arduino and the British furniture company Open Desk, which is creating open design furniture in collaboration with 600 furniture creators all over the world, are just a few examples of how open source has become the foundation of some of the most innovative and interesting business models of our time.

Danish Design Centre has dived into this trend for the past year; a trend which is part of a large wave of technological disruption and digitization and which is currently top of mind for many companies. How do you get started with digitizing your business model, and how do you know if open source manufacturing is the future of your company? These questions aren’t easy to answer.

Growth programme for curious Danish production companies

This is why we, in collaboration with a range of partners, have initiated REMODEL, which is a growth programme for Danish manufacturing companies who wish to explore and develop new business models based on open-source principles, and which are tailor-made to fit their industry and their specific situation. REMODEL demystifies a complex concept and helps the company develop economically sustainable business models which can open op new markets and new economies.

We do this by using strategic design tools, which make up the foundation of the programme, and which are based on strong design virtues such as iterative experimentation, the development of rapid prototypes and most importantly, focusing on the needs of the end-user. On top of this, REMODEL also involves a global panel of experts, CEOs and researchers within the field of open source, which allows the programme to pull on expertise from some of the world’s most visionary innovators.

Timeline for the programme

REMODEL consists of a series of design-driven stages. Last year the programme was launched in a testing phase in which the Danish Design Centre collaborated with a handful of Danish manufacturing companies, including renowned hifi-manufacturing company Bang & Olufsen, who went through early modules of the programme over the course of the spring 2017. These modules were reiterated along the way based on the feedback from those tests.

The key learnings from these test as well as workshops with members of the expert panel then became the foundation for the official REMODEL programme, which launched on February 5, 2018, and where 10 pioneering companies are currently working their way through the programme, which has been set up as an 8 week design sprint. The outcome is for them to have gained a thorough strategic understand of the concept of open source hardware as it relates to their industry and furthermore a draft strategy to open one of the existing products in their portfolio.

Radical sharing of knowledge

Learnings, tools and methods from both the test runs and the main programme will be collected and shared in a REMODEL open source hardware business model toolkit, which will be freely available after the program.

On top of this we will be organising a REMODEL knowledge sharing summit in October 2018, where participating companies, the international expert panel, prominent speakers and anyone else who are interested are invited to Denmark to share their experiences and think about the next steps for open sourced-based business models and strategies for manufacture companies.

Discussing REMODEL internationally

In March 2018, Danish Design Centre is yet again participating in the world’s largest technology event, SXSW Interactive, in Austin, Texas. We have been invited to host a panel debate as part of the official schedule under the title ‘Open Source Innovation: The Internet on Your Team‘, where speakers from Bang & Olufsen, Thürmer Tools and Wikifactory will discuss the topic in general as well as tell stories from the REMODEL program.

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

Originally published in danskdesigncenter.dk

Lead image: Open Desk builds furniture as open design. (c) Rory Gardiner

Text image: CC-BY-NC Agnete Schlichtkrull

The post Is manufacturing of the future OPEN SOURCE? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Patents destroy innovation

We hear about patents everywhere. They are commonly included in indexes of progress and innovation, used for the purpose of rating research institutions, universities and companies. The proponents of the patent system believe that patents are helping to stimulate innovation, by making the knowledge publicly available and by granting the inventor the right for exclusive commercial exploitation.

Unfortunately, the patent system currently is doing the opposite^[1,2,3,4] . We have patent trolls^[5], companies who buy or file patents just to stop competitors from innovating, lawyers writing patents just to make them obscure and incomprehensible, and hundreds of court cases, or “patent wars” as they are known, where companies actually try to prevent one another from engaging in the process of innovation. Another less known problem is the cost to acquire a patent, in terms of money and time. The cost for a European patent is around 30,000€^[6] making it almost impossible for start ups and SMEs to apply for and obtain a patent. As a result, knowledge and innovation remains buried in drawers. Just in the past 3 months our social co-op took part in a competition and was thinking to apply for a EU development fund, both of which had in their point system a bonus for a filed patent. The problem is, firstly that we do not have the financial resources to file a patent and most importantly we do not want to do so since we are an open-source company, although we are positive that our product could acquire a patent. Traditional institutions and organization across the world do not yet understand the benefits of open-source innovation. So, in order to follow up on the example of the GPL^[7] and the Creative Commons licenses,^[8] which hacked the copyright law, we propose to hack the patent system.

Open Patents

We suggest a simple ways to mark a patent as open in a way that is similar to the Creative Commons licenses.

• Open Patent Attribution – OP-BY
• Open Patent Attribution, Share Alike – OP-BY-SA

Following the example of business man and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who publicly declared that anyone can use Tesla’s patents, because “[they] believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform”^[9].

So we propose that the cost of applying for a patent marked as “open” to be free or very low (i.e. under 500€), thus enabling inventors, SMEs, social innovators and even students to apply for patents which promote knowledge sharing, while allowing them to acquire the recognition they deserve and granting them the corresponding score in the indexes that take into account filed patents. Also, this can help Europe’s policy making around open source and social innovation, by suggesting that in the future all publicly funded innovation should be made publicly available through open patents. For example, it seems very unfair that  private research institutes or even universities, who do research funded by European taxpayers’ money, acquire patents on the results of that research and claiming ownership over them, thereby forcing us to pay licensing rights for access to the products that come out of the research that we funded in the first place.

This text is released into the Public Domain under the Creative Commons CC0 “no copyright reserved” license.

References

1. “A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not”, Michael Fitzgerald, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/yourmoney/15proto.html
2. “The case against the patent system”, Pierre Desrochers, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
3. “Our Broken Patent System at Work: Patent Owner Insists the ‘Integers’ Do Not Include the Number One”, Vera Ranieri, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/our-broken-patent-system-work-patent-owner-insists-integer-does-not-include-number
4. “The ‘broken patent system’: how we got here and how to fix it”, Nilay Patel, http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/11/broken-patent-system
5. “Patent Troll”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
6. “Study on the Cost of Patenting”, Roland Berger Market Research, https://effi.org/system/files?file=cost_anaylsis_2005_study_en.pdf
7. “GNU General Public License”, Free Software Foundation, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
8. “Creative Commons Licenses”, Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
9. “All our patent belong to you”, Elon Musk, https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

The post A Call for Open Patents appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On Patents, Open Source Design and Reciprocity

I previously blogged on open source and IP here and I wanted to revisit this in a more concise way to focus in on the limitations of open source and commons approaches in the context of patents.

The Benefits of Open Source Design

Developing a product or technology in an open source way offers advantages to society and also the development team. For the core team they have the many eyes of the community on the key development issues, a form of giant, distributed R&D department. Building a strong network of collaborators and a vibrant community which will contribute to varying degrees also acts to build a market and a brand for the core team (whether they be a company, charity or foundation). For society, commonly held knowledge resources are created which has a great value both as an educational resource and making technologies available to communities around the world. It adds resilience and sustainability to our communities by allowing technologies to be re-purposed appropriately and also more easily maintained to minimise waste.

The Open Source Ecology project is a great example of this resilient commons based approach that is strictly open source in its approach. Their values statement encapsulates this:

“The end point of our practical development is Distributive Enterprise – an open, collaborative enterprise that publishes all of its strategic, business, organizational, enterprise information – so that others could learn and thereby truly accelerate innovation by annihilating all forms of competitive waste. We see this as the only way to solve wicked problems faster than they are created – a struggle worth the effort. In the age where companies spend more on patent protectionism than on research and development – we feel that unleashing the power of collaborative innovation is an idea whose time has come.”

The funding model for OS Ecology seems to be based around two main sources, crowdfunding/donations and charging for educational workshops teaching others to build and use the machines they have designed.

The Limits of Open Source Design & the Need for Reciprocity

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation however emphasizes the need for reciprocity, suggesting, “the more communistic the licence, the more capitalistic the outcomes”. Making the case here that with open source projects eg. Linux, a profit maximising company can come in and make massive profits using the commons resource of the stable body of code at the centre of the Linux project.

This means that the value of the commons provided by free labour is being exploited by private companies and that they are not then obliged to give back to the commons to sustain it financially.

To this end, Dmytri Kleiner, has proposed the Peer Production License (PPL) whereby free use is granted to non-profits and coop entities, but commercial entities which make no contribution have to pay a license fee. Michel Bauwens has termed this an example of a Commons-Based Reciprocity License (CBRL), which has been further developed into Copyfair. These proposals suggest a means to create a self-sustaining commons of knowledge that accepts wider community contributions and at the same time provides for funds to enhance and grow a core team of curators for the project.

 The nature of IP – Copyright and Patents Are Very Different

Importantly, however, for the discussion of the application of open source in physical designs, a CBRL/copyfair licence would be based on copyright, as with creative commons or copyleft style arrangements. Now, copyright is an automatic right in most countries, so in adopting a copyleft, copyfair or other licences you are then disposing of a recognition of ownership that you already have.

Patents, on the other hand, are territorially based and ownership is granted by the relevant state authorities following a relatively lengthy procedure with very real financial costs. This is largely incompatible with distributed open innovation particularly as secrecy (non-disclosure) must be maintained up until a patent is filed.

This means that an open source physical design could have the schematics and drawings of a design’s implementation covered by a CBRL but in terms of fundamental principles which would be patentable, the commons could not be protected in this way.

In fact, when we look around at the more popular open source design and open source hardware projects, such as the Ultimaker,  the (original)Makerbot or Reprap, they are all based on expired, existing patents. They do not, in general, propose new technologies that would be patentable, though interestingly, when Makerbot was bought out by stratasys, it then filed a patent and released a range of closed-source models to the market. This eventually led to conflict with the original supportive community that had grown around the original open source Makerbot. Makerbot were accused by the community of stealing ideas and attempting to patent them, an enclosure of the commons. The community reacted with the hashtag #takerbot on social media.

 Pragmatic Conclusions

Reliance on copyright and copyleft in a classic Open Source project leaves collaboratively produced product innovations in the paradox highlighted by Michel Bauwens: that the more communal the license, the more commercial interests can exploit them without contributing to sustaining the innovation process that generated them.

If an open source project were conducted in secret, however, it would not be able to leverage the network benefits of the distributed development resource of the online community and would be forced back into the standard model of investment, patent acquisition and defence.

Conversely, if a development is carried out in a truly open model with disregard for how patents work, the open community could find its work enclosed at a later date by a proprietary patent as seen with the Makerbot community.

As a practising designer and engineer I am looking to launch a technology project and I want to embed the values of open source communities in its development. In particular, I want to ensure that the technology is not used for military applications.

I have come to the conclusion that a patent is needed to establish a “property” which I can then licence at a lower fee to non-profits in a way that reflects the goals and spirit of the CBRL. The core technology will then be a basis for an open source community platform around which developments and applications grow. Any licensing fees to larger profit-maximising companies will then feed directly back into sustaining this platform. The challenge then is to reach the stage of obtaining patents in key territories without requiring external investors who do not share these goals.

The post Patents and the Limits of Open Source Licenses appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The film(s) were produced by Amar Kanwar and the Foundation for Ecological Security, a leading advocacy group for the commons in India. The vignettes of each film are a lovely evocation of what the commons truly means to commoners in India. This is an important task — naming and evoking the commons — because governments and businesses of the modern world cannot see or generally refuse to recognize the commons. They are too focused on individuals shorn of social community, private property rights, and market growth.

Here are the seven succinct declarations made by each short film:

1. Recognize the signature of our commons!  The film flashes words on the screen referring to things we depend upon and share without realizing it:  the air, folk dances, butterflies, playgrounds, the wind, grandma’s cure, the Internet.  The list goes on.

2. Recognize the Reciprocity of Our Commons!  The film notes how different elements of nature of which we are a part are interdependent….which leads to another point:

3. Recognize that Our Commons are a Web of Life!

4. Recognize the Safety Net of Our Commons!  The film notes that common property resources contributed about US$5 billion annually to the income of poor Indian households in 2009 – which is about one-third of India’s total rural development budget in 2009.  (I’d be curious to learn how the price equivalences of value drawn from common property resources was determined, however!)

5.  Recognize Our Unique Relationship with the Commons!  Not open, not closed. Not private, not public. Not government, not business. Not communist, not commercial.  Not yours, not mine.

5. Recognize the True Value of Our Commons!  If we relate to nature only within the vocabulary of profit, then it is certain to be destroyed.

6. Recognize the Shared Ownership of Our Commons!  The film notes that 126 patents have been granted to companies worldwide for using the medicinal property of the neem tree. Traditional medical knowledge belongs to all!

7. Recognize the Communities in Our Commons!  The film cites a traditional love song, Nimbooda, that has long been sung by the Manganiyar community of Rajasthan, a famous troupe of folk musicians of the Thar Desert whose music has been passed on from generation to generation.  The producers of a Bollywood film appropriated a version of the song sung by Ghazi Khan, copyrighting it.  Now the people who keep this music alive cannot legally perform their own song without paying a royalty and seeking permission from the Bollywood film music company.  The obvious point: folk music is collectively owned by the community.

I am reminded of some wonderful posters that the Foundation for Ecological Security created in 2011 for a major conference on the commons.  Take a look!

The post Seven Short Films on the Commons in Seven Minutes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero – which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.

Further, a large institution could dedicate many servers to this task, along with developing more advanced techniques such as deep learning, to flood the prior art space. It is not unforeseeable with current technology (along with sufficient cash for fees) to flood the actual patent application process itself with sufficiently advanced patent applications based on this concept.

A sister website All The Claims is attempting the same thing, but with the use of claims and a more verbose alternative.

This is a project of Alexander Reben

@artBoffin

FAQ

How can I help?
The response to this idea has been great, I’ve had a few people ask how they could help, here are some ways. Contact me if you would like to help

• Donate server space or server hardware
• Funding
• Legal assistance
• Coding work

What’s with the titles of the entries?
The numbering scheme of the prior art is as follows, the first 10 digits is UNIX epoch time followed by a dash, the remainder is a UUID type 4 identifier. This allows for both identification of when the text was created along with a globally unique ID.<

Why this Creative Commons License?

The particular Creative Commons license was chosen to prevent commercial use of the text along with restricting derivatives, since the point of the prior art is to be publicly published unmodified (as it is to be a valid reference point). Also, this license applies to the actual text itself and not to the inventions described – as that is now prior art (the whole point of the exercise). If you want to do something interesting with this data and for some reason this license does not work for you, please contact me.

Doesn’t the USA’s transition to first-to-file make this not work?

-Even with the change to the first-to-file system in the USA, the patent applicant still needs to prove they are the original inventor, which would not be true for any inventions published here.

-The intent is not to prevent actual creative and innovative patents from being filed, it is to take the obvious and easily automated ideas out-of-play. If an idea is truly creative and innovative, a computer should have difficulty coming up with it.

Is this really prior art?

The EPO has a good guide:

“Prior art is any evidence that your invention is already known.
Prior art does not need to exist physically or be commercially available. It is enough that someone, somewhere, sometime previously has described or shown or made something that contains a use of technology that is very similar to your invention.
A prehistoric cave painting can be prior art. A piece of technology that is centuries old can be prior art. A previously described idea that cannot possibly work can be prior art. Anything can be prior art.
An existing product is the most obvious form of prior art. This can lead many inventors to make a common mistake: just because they cannot find a product containing their invention for sale in any shops, they assume that their invention must be novel.
The reality is very different. Many inventions never become products, yet there may be evidence of them somewhere. That evidence – whatever form it may take – will be prior art.”

Yeah, but doesn’t prior art need to “enable”?
Yes, a person who is knowledgeable in the field of the invention should be able to reproduce the invention without experimentation. I think many of the entries that make sense are able to be made by someone skilled enough. Even if not, I’ve hedged my bets with a sister website All The Claims which is attempting the same thing, but with the use of claims as a more verbose and detailed alternative. Also, one might be able to argue that the entires if not prior art do point out that the idea may be obvious.

This is stupid / it won’t hold up / the patent office won’t use it / etc..
While it will be great if this turns out to be a viable tool to fight patent trolls, as long as it is sparking discussion and thinking, it is performing its purpose. It’s in a way fighting an unintelligent and single-minded problem with an equally silly and brute-force method, which I find humorous. If it does turn out to not hold up in court, maybe a similar idea will. This is running off an old server in my studio, imagine if there was a patent troll with the resources of Amazon or Google putting effort towards this idea – coupling much more hardware along with better algorithms and things like deep learning actually publishing algorithmically generated patents.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

ANTEPOSSIBLE LLC

The post How to obviate the patent system by algorithmically generating all “prior art” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The origins of modern intellectual property law can be traced back to the occasional awards of exclusive rights to artists in ancient Persia and Greece.

“Letters patent,” meaning open letters, were issued in 14th-century England to induce foreign craftsmen to relocate there. Attempts to coordinate global intellectual property rules led to the 1883 Paris Convention and the 1886 Berne Convention, and eventually to the creation of the United Nations’s World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967. But nations who signed on to those agreements retained the ability to determine the length of patents and what products would be covered. For many nations, that flexibility meant excluding medicines from patent protection. For example, Germany’s patent law of 1877 labeled medicines as “essential goods,” along with food and chemicals, and prohibited any attempts to patent them.

In the middle of the 20th century, several postcolonial nations adopted similar laws. India’s patent law extended only to the processes for creating medicines, not the drugs themselves. The law opened the door for Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers to reverse-engineer patented drugs and then devise different, cheaper production methods. India soon became known as “the pharmacy of the developing world.” Brazil, Mexico, and other Central and South American countries also adopted limits on the patentability of medicines.

European countries like Italy and Sweden didn’t grant pharmaceutical patents until the 1970s, and Spain refused to do so until 1992. Even when medicine patents were given, many nations granted liberal access to compulsory licenses for patented drugs, meaning that generic manufacturers were free to make the drugs and pay a royalty to the patent holders. During the period between 1962 and 1992, Canada granted 613 licenses to import or manufacture pharmaceutical products.

As commerce became increasingly global, this state of affairs deeply concerned pharmaceutical companies. Over time, an industry that once competed on the basis of manufacturing innovation and price had come to rely on the profits of patent monopolies. At one time in the mid-20th century, for example, Pfizer drew a full 33 percent of its global sales from just two patented drugs. So—as extensively chronicled in Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite’s 2002 book, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? —Pfizer took the lead in an ambitious campaign to create a global system of intellectual-property protection: an enclosure of essential medicines.

The first step in that effort was countering the dominant international view that medicine compounds were not private property that could or should be owned by companies and individuals. Economists call this process the transformation of a public good into a “club good,” like taking a public park and turning it into a gated dues-required golf course. A July 1982 op-ed in The New York Times by the chair of Pfizer International, entitled “Stealing from the Mind,” started the process of creating that club good. The column charged that US inventions were being “stolen” by governments that didn’t protect patent rights. When governments outside the US refused to block generic manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry argued, they were indulging acts of piracy.

But there was little in the way of binding international law to back up that position. So the industry pushed directly for the US government to make intellectual-property protection a priority in all trade negotiations. Of course, inserting monopoly patent rights into trade agreements runs counter to those agreements’s stated purpose of dismantling barriers to global competition. Yet the pharmaceutical industry, reliably at the top of the list in both lobbying expenditures and political campaign contributions in the United States, quickly found willing partners on Capitol Hill and in the White House. The United States soon adopted intellectual property protection as a litmus test for its trade partners.

The approach was to offer carrots to patent-resistant countries—enhanced access to US markets and some reductions in the subsidies of US agricultural exports—while simultaneously brandishing some imposing sticks. In 1984, aggressive pharmaceutical sector lobbying helped amend the US Trade Act to give the president the authority to impose duties on or withdraw trade benefits from any nation that did not provide “adequate and effective” protection for US intellectual property.

A few years later, the law was amended again, this time to give the US trade representative the power to put offending countries on what became known as a Special 301 watch list, a designation dreaded by countries whose economies relied on trade with the United States. The two countries that resisted pharmaceutical patents most vigorously, India and Brazil, were placed in the more serious “priority” watch list.

Against this ominous backdrop, the World Trade Organization in 1986 convened talks to create a global intellectual-property agreement. At the time the talks began, more than 40 of the 90 counties involved refused to grant patents for pharmaceutical products, and others that did grant them adopted strict limits. But over the course of years of negotiations, US trade pressure wore down the resistance. By April of 1994, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, a.k.a. TRIPS, was signed by 123 government ministers. The deal was one of the foundational documents of the World Trade Organization, and immediately became the most significant intellectual property agreement of modern times.

TRIPS transformed an uneven worldwide patchwork of intellectual property law into a blanket of standards mandating protection for holders of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. For patent holders, that protection features at least 20 years of government-granted monopolies on their products, including medicines. TRIPS also requires each nation to award intellectual-property rights regardless of national origin, a boon for multinational pharmaceutical corporations, and a death blow to their local manufacturing rivals.

The enclosure of essential medicines was complete.” (http://www.thenation.com/article/corporations-killed-medicine-heres-how-to-take-it-back/)

The Fallacy of the Patent Incentive, by Fran Quigley:

“When it comes to inducing innovation for essential medicines, it turns out that the evil of monopoly patents isn’t at all necessary.

The history of pharmaceutical innovations, especially vaccine developments and life-saving treatments for infectious and chronic diseases, shows that the critical research behind these developments was created outside the patent system. Even in the current post-TRIPS era, patent-seeking private industry still looks to governments to provide funding for pharmaceutical research, especially for essential medicines. The US National Institutes of Health alone provides $30 billion annually for medical research; governments provide tax credits to support corporate research; and government health programs are bulk purchasers of patented medicines priced far above the costs of production.

When it comes to medicines, the taxpayers of the United States and other research-supporting countries are the very opposite of free riders: They pay to build the bus, fill it with fuel, and hire the driver. But they’re still asked to pay a steep fare if they wish to take a seat.

In fact, a decade ago, US economist Dean Baker crunched the numbers and estimated that the US could save over $140 billion a year if its health systems could provide medicines without the artificial mark-up imposed by monopoly patents. That money could fund the replacement of all private industry research and development several times over, while still leaving billions of dollars in remaining public benefit. A significant source of those savings derives from eliminating the for-profit pharmaceutical companies’s expenses on marketing, a cost that exceeds their investment in research and development. As it happens, there are more efficient uses of resources than funding television ads for erectile dysfunction drugs.

The enclosed medicine system inflicts additional damage beyond the artificially inflated cost of patented medicines. The resources of for-profit corporations are inevitably concentrated on the development and promotion of medicines that can be sold at a high mark-up to wealthy consumers. “Lifestyle” drugs that address male pattern baldness or sexual performance are exhaustively researched and marketed, yet the past half-century has seen just one drug developed to treat tuberculosis, which kills more than a million people each year. A landmark study published by the British medical journal The Lancet showed that of the 1,556 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 2004, only twenty-one were for tropical diseases.

When corporations do develop a new drug, it more than likely doesn’t provide much value to society. Remarkably, a full 70 percent of the medicine brought to market by the industry in the past 20 years provided no therapeutic benefit over the products already available. Instead, these “me too” drugs were put forward in order to grab a share of an existing lucrative market.

The inefficiency of the enclosed medicine is paired with the creation of real barriers to medicine innovation across the board. By definition, a reward system based on artificial exclusivity will wall off knowledge from being shared. For-profit pharmaceutical corporations are known for discouraging innovations by creating voluminous “packet thickets” and seeking extended protection for their monopolies in a process known as “evergreening” their patents.

Seen through the lens of a pharmaceutical corporation, all of these approaches are fully rational: The industry is one of the most profitable in recent history. The rest of us are not faring as well. Law professor Michael Heller has labeled the costs associated with over-enclosure and lack of knowledge sharing as the “tragedy of the anti-commons.”

It is an economic theory, of course. But, for the millions of people who die each year from diseases neglected by the current medicine system, the tragedy is not the least bit theoretical.”

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

The post The Enclosures of Essential Medicines (2): The fallacy of patent incentives appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the rich and the powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and small farmers were relegated to wage laborers. In Das Kapital, Marx described the process by coining the term land-grabbing. To British historian E.P. Thompson, it was “a plain enough case of class robbery.”

More recently, a similar enclosure movement has taken place. This time, the fenced-off commodity is life-saving medicine. Playing the role of modern-day lords of the manor are pharmaceutical corporations, which have taken a good that was once considered off-limits for private profiteering and turned it into an expensive commodity. Instead of displacing small landholders, this enclosure movement causes suffering and death: Billions of people across the globe go without essential medicines, and 10 million die each year as a result.

Many people curse the for-profit medicine industry. But few know that the enclosure erected around affordable medicines is both relatively new and artificially imposed. For nearly all of human history, attempting to corner the markets on affordable medicines has been considered both immoral and illegal.

It’s time now to reclaim this commons, and reestablish medicines as a public good.

Most of us define public goods broadly. We use the term to refer to benefits like law enforcement, street lights, and mass transit, which are collectively provided and deliver shared value to all. Economists narrow down that definition somewhat, saying that public goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable in their consumption.

Non-rivalrous means that any one person can benefit from a good without reducing others’ opportunity to benefit as well. My eating an apple prevents you from consuming it, so that’s a rivalrous good. But I can watch the same TV show as you without lessening your opportunity to enjoy it as well—that’s non-rivalrous.

Non-excludable means what it sounds like: A person cannot be prevented from consuming the good in question. Clean air is a good that can be enjoyed by all without the possibility of denying access to those who don’t register or pay a fee. But access to a private swimming pool is an excludable good. The classic example of a non-rivalrous, non-excludable public good is a lighthouse: One ship benefitting from its warning doesn’t subtract from any other ships’ chances of enjoying a similar benefit, and there’s no practical way of limiting the lighthouse’s warnings to a select few.

As the English enclosure movement proved, exclusivity can be artificially created by literally or figuratively walling off common access. Exclusivity can be undone as well: The modern open-source software movement takes a good that some have tried to make exclusive—software code—and freely shares it, leading to a plethora of creative developments.

In terms of medicines, an individual pill is rivalrous, but the details of the formula for creating that pill are not. Knowledge is a classic public good, in that it can be shared widely without penalty to the original owner. As Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening me; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

The public-health implications of access to medicines generate another core quality of public goods: positive externalities.

One person’s consumption of an essential medicine provides clear benefits beyond the direct consumer. Vaccines, for example, prevent the recipient both from getting ill and from spreading the disease to others. If a society vaccinates widely enough, the chain of disease transmission is broken, leading to the quintessential public good of mass immunity. Global distribution of the smallpox vaccine, for example, has led to the eradication of a disease that once infected 50 million people a year.

Even less obviously social medicines allow their recipients to better contribute to the social fabric and economic productivity of their communities. These medicines save costs for the broader society, too. When a diabetic takes insulin or a person with a risk for heart disease takes cholesterol-reducing medicine, they not only function better: They also lower their prospects of needing more expensive medical treatment, which is a cost often shared across societies.

Conversely, a lack of access to medicine causes enormous social problems in terms of contagion and economy-depressing illnesses.

So it’s little wonder that, for nearly all of human history, societies have treated medicine as a commonly held benefit. Until well past the middle of the 20th century, few countries allowed individuals or companies to hold exclusive rights to produce medicines. And governments have long been involved early and often in the pharmaceutical industry, creating the very opposite of a laissez-faire market. Most industrialized governments tightly regulate the production and distribution of medicine, while actively promoting vaccinations and encouraging safe use of other medicines. Governments are both leading funders of medicine research and top purchasers of the end products of that research.

When governments don’t take a sufficiently activist role in the field of medicines, public opinion pushes them further. In the 1990s and 2000s, advocates gave voice to passionate outrage over the devastating human cost of patent-priced HIV/AIDS medicines, which limited access to sufferers who could afford expensive treatments. US activists threw the ashes of AIDS victims on the lawn of the White House, while African activists called treatment-resistant government ministers murderers. The protests led to the dismantling of patent price barriers—and then to massive public programs to distribute the medicine at low or no cost.

Among governments and the public alike, medicines continue to be treated as a good quite distinct from consumer items like cell phones or flat-screen TVs. A human right to access essential medicines has found its way into international treaties and national constitutions. A moral claim for universal access to essential medicines has been put forth not only by faith-based organizations and civil society actors, but also by many drug developers themselves. Jonas Salk, for example, declined to pursue a patent for the polio vaccine, saying the patent belonged to the people. The creator of the first synthetic malaria vaccine donated the patent to the World Health Organization.

As Salk said in 1952: “Would you patent the sun?”

Photo by Victoria Reay

The post The Enclosures of Essential Medicines appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, once wrote that “the old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” In the case of the new world offered by liberatory technologies, most of the birth struggle results from the principalities and powers of the old world fighting to imprison the forces of the new world in their old institutional framework.

Lewis Mumford borrowed a term from geology — “cultural pseudo-morph” — to describe the process by which new, potentially liberating technologies were instead incorporated into the institutional forms of the old world, like new mineral deposits that gradually formed a fossil in the shape of buried organic matter. He was referring in particular to the technologies of what he called the neo-technic age, like the electric motor, which by nature were low-overhead and decentralizing. The optimal use of such technologies would have been to replace the paleotechnic order (in which large factories were built to economize on steam power by running as many machines as possible off a prime mover) with a new model of manufacturing where a motor of any size could be built into a machine wherever it was used, the machine could be scaled to production flow, production flow could be scaled to immediate demand, and the site of production could be located close to the point of consumption.

Instead, the forces of the old paleotechnic world were strong enough to put the new wine of electrical power into the old institutional framework of Dark Satanic Mills, in the form of mass production (which threw away all the special advantages of electric power for decentralized, lean production).

Although Mumford didn’t live to see it, the internal crisis tendencies and inefficiencies of mass production eventually led, from the ’70s on, to the outsourcing of actual production to small job-shops owned by independent contractors. The new technological wine still remained in the old corporate bottles, thanks to the use of patents and trademarks to enforce a corporate monopoly on the distribution of a product they didn’t actually make. But the rapid implosion in cost and scale of tabletop CNC machinery, especially open-source versions, are unleashing productive forces that are making “intellectual property” unenforceable. It’s only a matter of time before garage factories using small-scale general-purpose machinery to produce on a craft model are ignoring patents and trademarks and making goods for local neighborhood markets all over the world.

The same is true of network communications and digital culture. Libertarian Marxists like the Oekonux group in Germany and the autonomists Negri and Hardt see “commons-based peer production” as the kernel of a post-capitalist society that will gradually emerge from within the interstices of the present system, coalesce into a new system, and supplant the old one.

These new technologies of abundance are still held captive within proprietary frameworks like Windows and OSX operating systems, corporate-owned sharing apps like Uber and AirBNB, and the like — enclosed in a neo-feudal “intellectual property” framework to enable the extraction of rents.

But the days of this intermediate stage are numbered. The productive forces unleashed by these new technologies cannot be contained by the old authoritarian class relations. Proprietary “sharing” apps like Uber, which create no value beyond interposing themselves as toll-gates between providers and users, are eminently vulnerable to replacement by hacked, open-source versions. And when communications technology enables horizontal networks to coordinate their projects more efficiently than corporate hierarchies, and open-source micro-manufacturing technology is so cheap that six months skilled blue collar pay can stock a garage factory with tabletop machinery, there’s nothing to stop producers and consumers from “Exodus” (Negri’s and Hardt’s word) from the system, to deal with each other as human beings and treat the technologies as means for their own dignity and empowerment.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Un Mondo Nuovo, che Lotta per Nascere.

The post If networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Extracted from TechDirt. You can read the full article here.

Back in March, Tim Cushing wrote about a rather remarkable report from the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed, in which she warned that copyright might run counter to human rights. As if that weren’t enough, Shaheed is back with another bold attack, this time on patents. As the summary to her report puts it:

There is no human right to patent protection. The right to protection of moral and material interests cannot be used to defend patent laws that inadequately respect the right to participate in cultural life, to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, to scientific freedoms and the right to food and health and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.

Patents, when properly structured, may expand the options and well-being of all people by making new possibilities available. Yet, they also give patent-holders the power to deny access to others, thereby limiting or denying the public’s right of participation to science and culture. The human rights perspective demands that patents do not extend so far as to interfere with individuals’ dignity and well-being. Where patent rights and human rights are in conflict, human rights must prevail.

The report touches on many issues previously discussed here on Techdirt. For example, how pharmaceutical patents limit access to medicines by those unable to afford the high prices monopolies allow — a particularly hot topic in the light of TPP’s rules on data exclusivity for biologics. The impact of patents on seed independence is considered, and there is a warning about corporate sovereignty chapters in trade agreements, and the chilling effects they can have on the regulatory function of states and their ability to legislate in the public interest — for example, with patent laws.

Read the rest of the article here.

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