Posts Tagged: "public private partnerships"

Certainly, patents that read on a potential cure for COVID-19 deserve special treatment. After all, the cure for COVID-19 is not only crucial to save lives all over the world, but also to avoid the collapse of the global economy. Yet, what such special treatment might look like and how special a treatment is necessary is where opinions diverge. In the United States, activists demand that the government should have the rights to the anti-retro viral drug, ‘Remdesivir’. The Open Covid Pledge proposes that all IP related to COVID-19 should be made freely available. Its founding adopters were technology companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and Amazon. In contrast, among pharmaceutical companies, the idea of giving up all related IP for free has been viewed critically. With this in mind, the question is therefore not whether patents related to COVID-19  should be given away for free or not, but rather how the profit motive can be managed in public- private partnerships for the benefit of public health.

As the new academic year starts in earnest we can be sure that the all too familiar attacks on the patent system will reemerge, as they always seem to do. Patent critics, who are not averse to making provably false claims, seem to believe that if they repeatedly say something that is false enough times it will miraculously become true. Hard to pin down, patent critics will deflect reality with thought experiments based in fiction and fantasy. They demand what we know to be true is actually false, as if we are in some parallel, bizzaro universe where up is down and white is black.