this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Ok I got a question. Is there a way other companies can reuse the ingredients/formula for a nonbrand drugs? (example Walmart Great Value for less money)
Yes, but only once the drug is off-patent. ~20 years.
IP law is a plague upon the pharmaceutical industry. It doesn't just inflate prices, but it stifles research as groups feel they have to try to avoid each other's parents. Sometimes scientific decisions are justified due to IP rights rather than scientific data. You'd be angered by how often this happens.
And sometimes it takes way longer than that.
There's even a controversy about whether Google's PageRank algorithm was intentionally developed as a worse version of (future) Baidu's RankDex so they could patent it. The fact that there's any scientific advancement at all under capitalism and the patent system is frankly a miracle.
In practical terms, sure, that actually happens a lot in other countries. In legal terms, i don't know if it can be done in the US right away or if they have to wait a certain amount of time or jump through god knows how many patent law hoops to not violate the borderline monopoly rights that a lot of these big companies manage to buy for themselves. The US pharma industry is notorious for protecting big corporations from competition by paying lobbyists to get laws that make it very difficult to sell off-brand alternatives.
Not sure how exactly that works in the USA, but one of the PT's government greatest achievement in Brazil was both providing legislation for selling off-patent drugs (called "generics") and also making those tax free to encourage competition.
Lots of really important drugs (for example gut worms) became much more affordable in the span of some 5 years.