Patents:Capitalism versusTechnological Advance

  Thus, a person on dialysis for kidney failure requires lifelong EPO at
$10,000 a year. Most of the world's sufferers, of course, have no access to such costly treatment.

 In 1997, Gisella Clemons, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, discovered a protein binding factor for EPO - that is, a protein that sticks to it and blocks its excretion. Combining this protein with EPO increases take-up by 10-50 times, vastly reducing the dosage required and making the drug both safer and more affordable.

 AMGEN was not interested. The company refused to make the more effective form of EPO themselves or to allow others to make it by giving them access to the patents in its possession. Martha Luehrmann, a colleague of Clemons, gave vent to her frustration: "A wonderful advance that could save hundreds of thousands of children from anaemia and death stays on the shelf because the patent system protects a company that doesn't want
to see any risk to its bottom line."

 Another example from the pharmaceutical industry. Bloch, a medical
researcher employed by Smith-Kline UK, devised a new dietary supplement for use in diuretic therapy. His supplement, a balanced combination of magnesium and potassium compounds, overcame the main defect of
existing diuretic drugs, including Smith- Kline's own Dyazide - namely, potassium depletion and its effects (fatigue, dizziness, confusion, etc.).
 In 1974 Bloch and Smith- Kline concluded a licensing agreement by
which Smith-Kline undertook either to develop the supplement itself or to
surrender its exclusive rights to Bloch. In the event it did neither. Bloch went to court, where his claims were accepted but no effective action was taken.

Keeping products inefficient and dangerous

 Many inventions have been suppressed in the motor vehicle industry.
Several of these could have greatly improved the efficiency of fuel use and
reduced or even eliminated polluting emissions. In 1936, for instance, Charles Pogue invented a carburettor that enabled a car to run over 200 miles to the gallon at speeds of up to 70 mph. More recently, Tom
Ogle designed a car in which a series of hoses fed a mixture of gas vapours and air directly into the engine. Tested in 1977, it averaged 100 miles per gallon at 55 mph.

 It is the oil corporations rather than the automobile manufacturers themselves that have the strongest interest in suppressing inventions that improve fuel efficiency and thereby reduce gasoline consumption. Thus, Exxon is said to have purchased and buried the design for a "momentum engine" with high fuel efficiency.

 Patents do not last forever. For that among other reasons, many new products do eventually see the light of day, even if only two, three or four decades after being invented. Patent owners imposed such long delays on the appearance of many now familiar products. Thus, the fluorescent light
bulb was patented in the 1920s but kept offthe market until 1938 in order to keep energy efficiency low and demand for electricity high. A "safe" (or at least safer) cigarette, from which much carcinogenic material had been removed, was invented in the 1960s but suppressed in favour of the
more dangerous kind until the last few years. The same thing happened to the telephone answering machine, the plain paper photocopier, the auto-focus camera, emission control devices for motor vehicles, the electronic thermometer, and artificial caviar.

Patent law reform or social use of knowledge?

 There are two divergent tendencies in patent law. On the one hand, patents are recognized as a form of property. An owner of property has the right to use that property or not at his or her discretion, and this applies to patents as it does, say, to land. On the other hand, legislators created patent law for the purpose of promoting technological advance in the public interest, so should the courts not try to discourage its misuse for the opposite purpose? Legal reformers like Saunders and Levine advocate changes to patent law that will strengthen the "public interest" tendency
and impede the suppression of useful inventions.

 The provisions of patent law do matter. The law already places certain
restrictions on the rights of patent owners; otherwise inventions would be suppressed even more thoroughly. So legal reform might have a beneficial effect. But, as in other areas of industrial regulation, companies will find means of complying with the letter of any new requirements while thwarting their spirit. Let us suppose that the owner of a new patent is required to put it to use within a fairly short time interval or otherwise forfeits the patent (and Saunders and Levine do not suggest anything nearly as drastic). Could they not start production of the new product while
"sabotaging" it to make sure sales of the old product would not be affected? For instance, the new product could be produced on a small scale and in
deliberately slipshod fashion, sold at a very high price with hardly any advertising, and so on.

 How much does it really matter if an invention has to wait a few decades
before it is widely applied? Not very much, perhaps, if it's a new kind of camera or photocopier. The delay is harder to tolerate if it's an effective treatment for a previously incurable disease. And, with global warming
upon us, new sources of environmentally harmless energy and new devices to raise energy efficiency are a matter of life and death for the planet. We can't afford to wait until capitalists finally find it profitable to make the switch to new technologies. It is high time to put knowledge and human
creativity at the direct disposal of the community.

STEFAN

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Cooking the  Books 1

The poverty line
Back in the days when the Tories were openly and deliberately the nasty party John Moore, Thatcher's Secretary of State for Social Security (so-called), declared that poverty no longer existed in Britain.

 That was in a speech in May 1988 (the same month that Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society), published the following year as a
pamphlet, The End of the Line for Poverty.

 What he meant was that destitution (people without enough to buy food, shelter and other necessities to survive) had disappeared thanks to
handouts from the state. He rejected any definition of poverty as relative as an invention of those who wanted to "call Western capitalism a failure".

 Now the Tory Party has abandoned this approach and has embraced the view that poverty is a relative concept, measured in relation "to prevailing social norms which change over time" (www.socialjustice challenge.com/uploads/tx_ev3evnews/SJPG_Clark_brief_final.pdf).

 Poverty in the EU, and so in Britain, is officially measured in relation, not to changing views as to what are "necessities", but to the living standards of the general population. The median take-home income including state benefits for each type of household (single, couples, couples with children, etc) is calculated on the basis that this is the income level at which there are just as many below as above it (about £330 a week, according to Daniel Finkelstein in the Times of 22 November, or about £17,000 a year for the average household). The poverty line is defined as 60 percent of this.

 This is just one definition, and a rather arbitrary one (it used to be defined as 50 percent), and other countries such as the US have a different one, but it's an attempt to measure how many have significantly less income than the other members of society.

 It does lay itself open to Moore's criticism that it means that poverty will never be abolished or, to be absolutely precise, would only be in the highly unlikely event that there would be no households with an income of more than 40 percent above the (moving) median, i.e.,today, no more than about £24,000 a year for the average household.

 To prepare their U-turn, the Tories got one of their MPs, Greg Clark, to analyse the statistics on poverty in Britain. He made an interesting discovery: that a large number of those classified as poor fell just below the 60 percent level; which meant that "poverty" could be reduced by increasing their income just enough to move them from 59 percent to 61 percent. He claimed that this was all the Labour government had done since 1997.

 Socialists are not committed to an EU-type definition of poverty.
We don't need this to show capitalism's failure to meet human needs
adequately. While accepting that what are "necessities" is historically
and socially determined and so varies over time and between (and even
within) different countries, we define poverty, not in relation to people's
consumption (how much food, clothing, shelter and the like they can
buy) but in relation to the means of production (whether or not they
own any means for producing wealth).

 The vast majority of people in the developed capitalist parts of the
world are propertyless in the sense of not owning any means of
production. The only productive resource they possess is their own
ability to work, their working skills, their labour-power. They are thus
poor in terms of ownership of the means of production, irrespective of
how much they are paid and of how many personal possessions they
may have. The line that divides the capitalist class from the working
class, that's the real poverty line.