"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Is It Stealing?

by Lee

We’ve had numerous discussions on this site regarding the downloading of MP3 files.  Many people do not regard it as theft, while I most certainly do.  So I’m quite curious to find out what those of you who justify song-swapping think about this.

The World Health Organisation yesterday predicted that Aids drug prices will drop to levels once thought impossibly low, as it rolled out its new strategy to get treatment to three million in the developing world by 2005.

The cost of Aids treatment in affluent countries where pharmaceutical companies have patents on their medicines is more than $10,000 (£5,800) a year.

Copies made by generics companies in India where the same patent rules do not apply are now being sold to African nations for around $300 a year. Launching the WHO plan in Nairobi, assistant secretary-general Jack Chow said: “We expect it to fall to less than half of that by the end of 2005. That is about a dollar a day at present, falling to 50 cents a day or less. In a world that spends billions of dollars on cosmetics, it is not a great deal of money.” . . .

The prices of Aids drugs have tumbled, thanks to grassroots activists in South Africa and elsewhere demanding drugs to keep people with HIV alive. The pharmaceutical companies came under pressure to drop prices and stop trying to block the generics companies from, as they see it, stealing their inventions and making cheaper copies. [Emphasis added]

So, to recap, American pharmaceutical corporations spend millions of dollars to develop a drug.  Indian pharmaceutical companies, which have different rules covering the production of generics, take the formula and reproduce it, completely eliminating the ability of the American company to reap profit from its investment.  Is this stealing, or is this simply yet another example of IP law gone wrong?  If you should be able to legally redistribute unlimited copies of a song you happened to purchase, why should India not be able to take the work product of an American company and make unlimited copies of it?  And what will the long-term effects on AIDS drugs be?  Should US companies be expected to pour R&D money into developing new drugs, knowing full well that India is going to turn around and steal their IP?

Update: Here’s another wrinkle for the discussion.  Pirate copies of Microsoft’s new operating system, Longhorn, are available for sale on the streets of Malaysia.  (Knowing China as I do, I’ll be willing to bet it’s all over Shanghai, too.) Now, does Microsoft have a right to their IP?  These are obviously developer CDs, given out at MS’s last developer conference.  So, since MS gave the OS to users, does this give the users the right to freely redistribute the software, even though it violates the terms and conditions agreed to as a prerequisite of the exchange?

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