The S3TC Patent Finally Expires Next Week - S3 Texture Compression

[AndyChow]

Often times though the patents allow the pharmaceutical companies to jack up prices to such an extent that they become unaffordable for most people for those 20 year periods. And yes funneling billions in research for a quick result is respectable and deserving compensation however you have to wonder if other researchers could have made the same discovery at some point naturally within that 20 year period without the several billion price tag and could have released it in under that 20 year time frame at a much lower price in a patentless system. After all even without billions funneled in research for each novel new drug there will still be active researchers and advances in technology that allow for easier discoveries of new information. We can't really tell if that massive monetary infusion for quicker discoveries is actually drastically reducing the time to discoveries or only slightly because we've always had this patent system in modern medicine.

This exorbitant pricing of drugs is also taken into consideration with health insurance costs which, at least in the US, raises premiums substantially and limits access to good insurance for many people. And if more people had easier access to affordable health care you could argue they'd be more likely to take part in preventative health measures which could theoretically limit the need for more advanced medical treatments for many of the preventable diseases we're funneling billions of dollars into research for new drugs.

In pharma, most drugs cost nothing to research, as most research is done in universities. The billions pharma spends is to generate the required proof that the drug is safe and effective. Going through the FDA process costs 600-800 million for each new drug introduced. If you remove patents from the equation, no one will ever pay that amount to get FDA approval, and no new drug will be allowed on the market.

Blame the high cost of drugs on the FDA, not on big pharma. The FDA is the reason a generic drug that was approved 60 years ago, if suddenly it's produced by a single pharma, that pharma can jack up the price 600-700 times, since for another pharma to produce it, they still have to go through the FDA, event if it's a patent-less molecule and already FDA approved.

Look up pyrimethamine. People hate Pharma Bro, but Pharma Bro isn't the problem, the FDA is the problem.

[Deavir]

Honesty the pharma industry is a shit show but banning patents for drugs is silly. GNU for drugs is silly as well (not really a copyright issue). Really it is a industry where your whole company can just go way with one or two drugs going south. You can't hate the industry because there are so many people trying to fix horrible problems that plague the world. The economics side is where the fixes should happen. Also better government funding in focused areas. The few general fixes would help a lot.

1. Government funding should be only for fundamental research. Also orphan drugs and out of patent drugs for different disorders should have subsidized clinical trials
2. Clinical trials should be done by a 3rd party. Results should be opened to publication after a reasonable time.
3. WHO/UN/(or the like) should have a generic drug manufacturing plant and supply the world with low cost safe drugs that should be fast tracked thru FDA and the like organizations.
4. Government should be able to set max prices to drugs based of benefit compared like drugs or hospitalization/surgery/economic cost if not treated.
5. Any advertising should be done by a physician group for the disorder teaching current guidelines or general information about the disorder. Companies can fund the advertising but must not focus on their drug only. The idea is to educate patients on the disorder and doctors on treatment guidelines, not only a specific drug.

[duby229]

Honesty the pharma industry is a shit show but banning patents for drugs is silly. GNU for drugs is silly as well (not really a copyright issue). Really it is a industry where your whole company can just go way with one or two drugs going south. You can't hate the industry because there are so many people trying to fix horrible problems that plague the world. The economics side is where the fixes should happen. Also better government funding in focused areas. The few general fixes would help a lot.

1. Government funding should be only for fundamental research, orphan drugs and rare diseases drugs should have subsidized clinical trials
2. Clinical trials should be done by a 3rd party. Results should be opened to publication after a reasonable time.
3. WHO/UN/(or the like) should have a generic drug manufacturing plant and supply the world with low cost safe drugs that should be fast tracked thru FDA and the like organizations.
4. Government should be able to set max prices to drugs based of benefit compared like drugs or hospitalization/surgery/economic cost if not treated.
5. Any advertising should be done by a physician group for the disorder teaching current guidelines or general information about the disorder. Companies can fund the advertising but must not focus on their drug only. The idea is to educate patients on the disorder and doctors on treatment guidelines, not only a specific drug.

About 5: Yeah, Pharma advertising in America is so retarded. They tell you why you should take only that specific drug for that specific problem, and then list off horrible and terrible side effects...

[starshipeleven]

Well, let's just ignore the implications of artificial chemical drugs for a moment and just realize that software is not the same thing. There are valuable reasons why open source software movements happened and public domain medical drug movements didn't happen.

Open source movements started because programming is also a hobby, while biochemistry research is not.

[starshipeleven]

About 5: Yeah, Pharma advertising in America is so retarded. They tell you why you should take only that specific drug for that specific problem, and then list off horrible and terrible side effects...

Also exactly the same level of retarded in EU.

[oibaf]

S3TC is going to be merged in mesa now: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...er/171265.html

[bug77]

Get a patent to be used by mainstream and you get 20 fucking years to live like a parasite. The patent laws are such a clusterfuck.

The parasite analogy does not hold, as the entity actually produced something that's still useful after 20 years.
At the same time it's clear a field where research is inherently slow (think microbiology where you actually have to wait for cultures to grow and whatnot) and a field where innovation is often almost instantaneous (software: copy two pieces of existing software covered by a permissive license, add a little bit of your own magic) cannot be both served equally well by the same rules.

[erendorn]

Well remember, the original idea makes sense - allow the independent small inventors protect their innovators from big companies that would steal their ideas.

But in practice it reversed the problem - small inventors and innovators get buried in fake patent lawsuits and associated legal fees, and the big companies use patents to stifle competition.

So generally speaking, I hate the idea of patents. However, the entire business model of the pharmaceutical industry is built around them. No company would spend billions researching a new drug for Alzheimer's disease or AIDS or Cystic fibrosis if every other drug company could just copy the result and sell it for pennies per pill. How do you remove patents without stifling drug research? I honestly don't know.

Either by restricting patents to drugs (at the very least removing them from fast paced industries like software), or by financing drug trials and approvals (the costlier part of the develomment) using public spending. The second one has the advantage that you'll also research treatments that are not patentable (which nobody wants to bring to market in the current system).

[Ruediix]

What really sucks is that the current owners of the patent were blatently violating the Fair and Reasonable Licensing practices standard required by OpenGL. Specifically they were giving no response to anyone wanting for licensing terms for any new applicants that were not already major players in the graphics industry.

Most major players just bought sub-licenses from other major players to get around this. Unfortunately, nobody owned a sublicense to allow Open Source release, even with a clause that it requires a license to be packaged with hardware. (i.e. Hardware Attached licensing). Hardware attached licensing is the proper way to handle this type of issue, after all.

The other major offender in not playing fair is the MPEG group. However, I haven't heard as much lately about them. They backed off after one of their members actually used an Open Source project against license (both MPEG and GPL licenses were violated), because it the encoder was superior.

[BlueJayofEvil]

The parasite analogy does not hold, as the entity actually produced something that's still useful after 20 years.

Incorrect. A patent holder is not required to produce anything, nor is usefulness a requirement of a patent grant, nor does anything actually have to be invented (software patents are just patents for methods, and all other industries have their own gripes with patent monopolies and their destructive effects on innovation and improvement.)
Most patents are used by lawyers to shake down licensing fees/settlements of actual producers/inventors/innovators without adding anything useful to the market or society overall.

Some relevant links:
Ten Myths About Patents - Falkvinge.net

Startup Investors: "Patents are a cancer" - Falkvinge.net

The Myth of the Sole Inventor - SSRN.com - Stanford Law School white paper

"Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine