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Originally posted by ltl/fb
Would you explain it better/more? Though this was actually helpful.
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To address Burger's broader question, IP is treated differently than other property because it
is different. Most property obtains some portion of its value from its inherent scarcity, whether it's real estate, or gold, or whatever. Most creative property can be more easily replicated, whether it's the book or movie protected by copyright, the invention protected by patent, etc. (That's what I meant about Pfizer/Disney/MSFT/etc going bankrupt without IP laws, because otherwise everyone could replicate their property with some degree of ease.) That's why the Constitution and Congress give inventors a limited monopoly over their creations, such that for some period of time, they can slice and dice these ownership rights to maximize their returns from this property, and to further innovation by providing creative people with financial incentives to create more stuff in the future.
Beyond that fundamental question there are, of course, arguments about the length and breadth of that statutory monopoly. At some point, it's dumb to make the monopoly TOO strong because it overly rewards current IP owners and discourages future innovation. (See, e.g., the recent and retroactive extension of copyright protection to a duration of 95 years or so, which just happens to benefit Mickey Mouse but has little or nothing to do with the whole creating-incentives-to-future-innovators thing.)
Burger's narrower question, though, isn't really about one of these controversial elements (at least as measured by IP standards). It's always been a pretty typical technique to divide up and license IP rights by territory. (You can make and/or sell my patented invention in country X, but not in country Y.) That's what Big Pharma has done here, and the price discrepancy has to do, IIRC, with price controls in Canada. So Big Pharma is entirely right to say that Canadian distributors can't sell into the US, because most likely they didn't give those distributors the right to sell outside Canada in the first place. In most cases, this outcome makes sense because no one would otherwise care, but here, this outcome is political suicide because we're talking about pills which improve and/or save lives. You won't let me buy this pill from a Canadian pharmacy for $5 when I'd otherwise have to buy it for $50 in the US? Fuck you, Big Pharma.
In other news, insomnia blows chunks. Hard.
Gattigap
