Archives for the 'Intellectual Property' Category
Vanity Fair does Frontal Assault on Monsanto
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The Green Issue of Vanity fair has already drawn fair critique for being campaign journalism with one-sided sourcing. My primary interest was a story titled Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear. Here is the nut graph:
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.
The main structure of the story is straight out of a report by the Center for Food Safety, called Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers. Center for Food Safety is a high profile anti-biotechnology lobby with strong ties to Union of Concerned Scientists. Center for Food Safety’s Executive Director, Andrew Kimbrell is an understudy of known anti-technologist Jeremy Rifkin, although Rifkin has no problems with plants bred with molecular plant breeding (PMB’s) which the anti-biotechnology lobby calls genetically modified organisms.
The report is a long list of supposed mistreatment of farmers at the hand of Monsanto, while the company is trying to protect and enforce it’s patent rights and license agreements.
The most famous case, which the Vanity Fair reporter did omit, is the Percy Schmeiser case from Canada. Scheiser had brown-bagged Monsanto Canola and was found guilty of this all the way through the Canadian Supreme Court. The anti-biotechnology lobby and Schmeiser himself is still claiming this was pollen flow, and that Monsanto was infringing on his heirloom seed by “polluting” those seeds via pollen flow. The Canadian court documents is unequivocal in their decision that this is not the case. Vanity Fair would not even have had a shred of credibility left, if they had used this case. Instead they picked a case that never went to court, so they could report on the bully tactics, rather than facts that was verified by a court.
The next part of the story is about Monsanto’s company history. This is taken directly out of the movie “The World According to Monsanto” which is a French crockumentary. The crockumentary gives a particular version of the well-known history of the chemical company Monsanto. The version is one that emphasizes malevolence and conspiracy. Against this backdrop the director asks the viewer if they think Monsanto has good intentions with their PMB’s.
The movie gets a ton of facts wrong, including such a basic fact as how Monsanto introduced the Roundup Ready trait into the soybeans. The movie claims the company used a gene gun, while they in fact have been using Agrobacterium for all the non-grass crops.
The last part of the story is about growth hormone for cattle. Diary farmers have been using growth hormone on their cattle since the 1940’s to increase the milk yield from their cattle. The hormones had to be harvested from the pituitary glands of cattle. Only in 1994 did scientists figure out how to get bacteria to produce the same hormone, and Monsanto markets this hormone under the brand name Posilac.
Certain diaries started labeling their milk as not containing growth hormones, which is factually wrong. All milk, regardless of hormone application will contain growth hormone. FDA said this was misleading marketing. The next attempt was to label the milk as produced without growth hormones, however since it is impossible to find a difference between milk from cattle that received growth hormones and milk from cattle that did not, the claim cannot be verified.
Vanity Fair argues that Monsanto is the ones that are pushing the label battle, while it is in fact food snobs that are insisting that this is important consumer information. I still claim that the label organic is all that is required, but most of the food producers in this battle are not willing to pay for organic milk. The food snobs started the label wars, to label Monsanto as the aggressor for defending their product, the integrity of consumer information, and sound science is misrepresentation.
From the beginning some consumers have consistently been hesitant to drink milk from cows treated with artificial hormones. This is one reason Monsanto has waged so many battles with dairies and regulators over the wording of labels on milk cartons. It has sued at least two dairies and one co-op over labeling.
We do in fact know that the milk labeled as produced without growth hormone never captured more than 1.5 percent of the diary market in the food conscious Northeast. But you will not find this information in the playbooks of the Center for Food Safety, which would require the poor reporter to actually do reporting…
Also, the part that the story leaves out on growth hormones and labeling is the fact that anti biotechnology lobby groups are leveraging lawsuits in most of the states across the country. This is driven by lobby groups, not by Monsanto. Monsanto is again in the position of defending itself, they are not the aggressor as Vanity Fair paints them.
For safe measure, Vanity Fair included one source in the whole story that was supposed to represent the other side. This one source was a call to Monsanto who declined to comment on the story about the country storeowner, which says Monsanto threatened him over illegally using the seed. There are plenty of sources out there who would be willing to discredit most all of the stories in Vanity Fair, but again the reporter could not bothered.
The final graph is just a plain out groin kick of Steven Milloy, who supposedly is behind a website that are presenting the other half of the labeling debate. There are some issues where Steven and I do not see eye to eye, mainly the stem cell debate. However, when it comes to all these issues about consumer safety and biotechnology, Steven has his facts straight, and the misleading information comes from the same sources that Vanity fair relied on so heavily in this story.
Thoughtful piece on patenting project
Morning edition had an amazing story about the government race to patent the atom bomb this morning. The patenting process actually jeopardized the secrecy of the project, but the government still went ahead so they would have a patent estate on all nuclear technology. What I really liked about this story is the loving care and fascination that 26-year old Alex Wellerstein put into documenting the nuclear patenting project.
Some things are supposed to be private….
Anti-biotechnology activists managed to leverage sunshine laws in Europe to get the EU government to release research information that was supposed to be confidential. Now the activists are trying to do the same thing in India, but for now the Supreme Court are debating the issue.
The research information is submitted to the government under the premise of confidentiality. The government has access to the information so it can review the safety and efficacy of new products, but it has made a promise to keep the information confidential for a time period.
The sunshine laws was never meant to give competitors access to proprietary business research, it was meant to give insight into the day to day workings of politicians and bureaucrats. Using it to break down corporate trust in the regulatory system will stymie innovation, which will cost all of us in the end.
About those Generic Drugs
Everyone likes generic drugs. So do I. Who wants to pay those shocking prices–you know, a couple bucks or even a few bucks a pill for potentially life-saving products: I mean, the gall of those pharmaceutical companies!–when a generic is out there for pennies on the dollar?
Seriously, it’s great to save money. But it appears that not all generics are equivalent to the name brands. Reports the Los Angeles Times:
The Generic Pharmaceutical Assn. touts them with a slightly catchier slogan: “Same Medicine. Same Results.” But sometimes, patients and their doctors beg to differ.
A switch from a long-used brand-name drug to its generic equivalent can, on occasion, bring a shifting profile of side effects. In a number of cases documented in medical journals and recounted in interviews with physicians, a generic version of what is often called a “pioneer” drug simply doesn’t appear to work as well for many patients.
“Everybody thinks generics are swell: To suggest otherwise is like saying you don’t love your mother,” said Dr. Peter R. Kowey, chief of cardiovascular diseases at the Philadelphia area’s Main Line Health System, who reviewed the issue of generic substitution of certain heart drugs for the American Heart Assn. But between some pioneer drugs and their generic imitators, Kowey said, “we are concerned that the margin of difference is large enough” to risk patients’ health.
Last December, the American Epilepsy Society called on the FDA to approve a large clinical trial to determine “once and for all” whether the substitution of brand-name drugs with generics increases the risk of “breakthrough” seizures or toxicity among patients with epilepsy. This type of research would probably take years. But until such a study is completed, the society declared, it would oppose measures by state, federal or private insurance programs that would limit physicians’ choices in prescribing anti-seizure medicines.
Last fall, an independent laboratory, prompted by a flurry of consumer complaints, presented evidence that a generic version of the once-a-day antidepressant Wellbutrin XL may be less effective than the original at reducing some patients’ depressive symptoms. An agency spokeswoman said the FDA is investigating the matter and will make its findings public when the inquiry is complete.
In a report released today, the New York-based ConsumerLab.com, which conducted the Wellbutrin XL analysis, also urges the FDA to review the performance of a new generic for Toprol XL, a once-a-day version of a high blood pressure drug that is the fifth most-prescribed medicine in the United States. That challenge comes after dozens of patients complained to the People’s Pharmacy — a multimedia source of information about drugs and supplements — of erratic spikes in blood pressure and side effects after they had switched from Toprol XL to a new generic version of the drug.
The fact that generics sometimes differ doesn’t mean that we should drop generics. But it does suggest that we–and particularly government medical programs and private health insurance plans–should be more judicious in promoting generics. Saving money ain’t everything when it comes to health care.
Patent that never expires? $5,000 please!
Kate Ackley wrote a great story about the most recent attempt to create a regulatory approval process for generic biotechnology medications on the Hill. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D- Calif.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) has introduced the Pathway for Biosimilars Act, and it is a pretty good piece of work although there are two interesting aspects about it.
First it creates a really long period of data exclusivity, which means that the FDA cannot use any of the filed data from the original patented biotechnology drug to compare to the data about the generic version of the drug. The 14 years of data exclusivity is what the patent holder pharmaceutical companies wanted, the generic pharmaceutical companies want less, much, much less.
In the name of protecting R&D investments on the part of the patent holders, the generic demand are probably on the lower end, but the patent demand is probably a bit on the high end. I am guessing somewhere in the middle, just based off my knowledge of politics, but my guess has nothing to do with the actual scientific requirements.
The second interesting aspect is what lobbyists call the “Botox carve-out”. The Botox carve-out makes an exception to the generic biologics approval process, so that biologics based on biological agents and toxins will not be approved. In essence this will make the patents for Botox last forever, as it is based on the botulin bacteria. I am not sure if Eshoo and Barton feels that they owe this to Allergan, the company who owns Botox, since the Allergan political action committee donated $5,000 to each of them last year. That was a cheap everlasting patent, but it will hamper some painkillers and other medication that are in the pipeline based on toxins.
The lobbyists paid for by the patent owning companies say this is due to national security concerns. This is a straw man. If you were a terrorist, would you really apply for a FDA approval?
Thailand’s Patented Bulls#!t Kills People
The newly elected government of Thailand is continuing the previous government’s disregard for international patent law and for the health of its citizens. Now the Thai Minister of Health is proposing that the government “ignore” four cancer medicine patents, and start domestic, unlicenced production.
The military dictatorship this government replaced a few months ago filed for TRIPS exceptions on four other drugs with the World Trade Organization. A TRIPS exception means that they claim there is a necessity for the country to ignore the patents. The necessity in this case is the need for the government to make sure their cronies gets their salaries paid for off the back of patients.
This was immediately embraced by the Green Party in Europe, because it doesn’t like patents, but the story the Greens forgot to tell was the epidemic of AIDS cases in Thailand that are resistant to Level 1 AIDS medications because the medicines produced by the government do not have a high enough quality and the patients develop resistance to medicines because of that. The Level 2 medications are not a whole lot more expensive, but the Thai health care system cannot afford the cost of the complex delivery systems for Level 2 AIDS medication.
Thailand started production of generic AIDS medications under the auspices of World Health Organization in 2000, but the WHO eventually pulled the project and the funding because the Thai government factories were not able to uphold the quality of the medications. The Thai government turned down the offer from WHO to get free medication from India, because that would not make their cronies any money.
TRIPS was a method for really poor governments to meet medical needs in spite of patent protection in an emergency. The World Bank rates Thailand as a middle-income nation, which means that it belongs to the second quartile ranking of countries.
A strange thing about the TRIPS application was that it included the medication Plavix, which treats heart disease. Last time I checked, arterial plaque did not belong to the diseases that poor people suffer from, however it is very common among people in the industrialized world who can afford a high-protein, high-fat diet.
Hollywood Unions’ Game of Chicken
I can’t stand awards shows, and I don’t watch the Oscars, but I do find the business aspects of Hollywood interesting — which is why I found the prospect of the Oscars’ cancellation due to the recent TV writers strike interesting. Given the influence of labor unions in the film industry and the industry’s importance to California’s economy, labor disruptions in Tinseltown can be very, very costly, as Alex Nowrasteh and I note in Capital Research Center’s Labor Watch.
Canceling the Oscars extravaganza would have cost L.A.’s economy $130 million, according to an estimate by Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation. Disaster was averted at the last minute, with an agreement reached between the studios and the Writers Guild only 12 days before Hollywood’s big night out, which addressed some of the issues over online content distribution.
Now with the Screen Actors Guild facing new contract negotiations, there may yet be another such game of brinkmanship as just played out between the writers and the studios — with the attendant peril to California’s economy. And episodes like this are likely to play out again every time a contract is up and new methods of content distribution are developed. Is this any way to run an industry?
For the full article, see here.
Canadian anti-biotech darling strikes again…
Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who was convicted of contract breach in the Canadian Supreme Court because he was brown bagging Monsanto seed against the license agreement he had signed, has decided to sue Monsanto in civilian court.
He is now claiming that there has been another incident of pollen flow onto his field from the neighbor’s field, so he is suing for approximately $582, which is the cost of removing the oilseed rape plants that grew on the field where he was preparing to grow mustard greens.
The funny thing is that Schmeiser has become enough of a anti-biotech wonder boy to warrant a 600 word story in British Guardian, even though this story would usually not even warrant a write up in a local paper…
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Relaxing Media Consolidation Rules
Ryan Blethen of the Seattle Times editorialized last Friday against relaxing FCC restrictions on media ownership. But these obsolete regulations harm consumer choice and innovation in an age of ubiquitous broadband access.
For the vast majority of Americans, whether in a town of 100,000 or a metro area of 10 million, newspapers remain very affordable and full of local news. Admittedly, local TV news broadcasts are unbearable venues of tabloid journalism, but that’s the case with nearly all news on television (whether on a 24/7 news channel or a big network). Regulating media ownership means fewer news alternatives—in the digital age where readers are flocking to the web, operating a newspaper profitably is not feasible without the efficiencies achievable through economies of scale. Preventing local media outlets from cutting costs through consolidation may force some newspapers and stations to shut down. How does that help create diversity in media?
At least Mr. Blethen acknowledges that “news through broadband is now as important as news off the press” But if he recognizes this, why advocate consolidation rules? If enough consumers desire local news, the free market will meet their needs. Maybe the reason for the lack of substantive community coverage is that most people just don’t care about local affairs. Though this may be undesirable in a democracy, it is not the job of government to dictate consumer preferences. Ordinary citizens already discuss local elections and post newsworthy information online.
Anybody can start a newspaper, pamphlet, or website. Where entry costs for print and broadcast media are prohibitive, there’s always the internet; hosting a website has become inexpensive and straightforward. The internet fills in the gaps in traditional media coverage; niche topics like technology news, for example, are discussed on a myriad of sites ranging from Slashdot to ArsTechnica.
Another major reason for the lack of media diversity is obsolete, inefficient central planning of the wireless spectrum by the FCC. Starting a radio or television station should be as easy as buying a transmitter and renting a slice of a frequency band, but due to rigid regulations, barriers to entry are formidable in the radio and television markets. Entrenched, government-granted monopolies might become detached from local markets, but only because the threat of competition is artificially diminished. Lifting regulations and reducing the scope of the federal bureaucracy will enhance media diversity and expand consumer choice.
International Fraud and the Law of the Sea Treaty
The most important treaty that most people have never heard of is moving closer to ratification. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held its first hearing on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) last Thursday. Natually, only pro-LOST witnesses, from the supposedly conservative Bush administration, were invited to share their views.
This coming Thursday will be a second hearing, at which CEI’s Fred Smith, joined by Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, will explain why accepting LOST would be a bad idea. Along with them will be another five proponents. Balance has never been in high demand on Capitol Hill.
Moreover, the treaty’s advocates are determined to downplay the likely impact of their handiwork. As I explain in a new CEI study, the LOST creates a bizarre regulatory system that threatens not just ocean mining, but technology, software, and entrepreneurial advances in other fields as well.
Perhaps most worrisome is the fact that treaty proponents simply cannot be trusted. They have adopted a strategy of hiding their goals until the U.S. commits itself. Only then will we suffer the full effects of ratification.
Should Amazon be able to patent 1-Click ordering?
The United States Patent and Trademark Office, after finally having done something right for a change, recently reversed a which rejected Amazon’s patent on One-Click ordering. The USPTO it seems wasn’t able to figure out why One-Click ordering isn’t an innovation that deserves a patent.
That the patent application was approved in the first place is yet another example of the frivolity of so many tech patents being issued nowadays. One-click ordering was described by the Examiner as “obvious”, and clearly it is a natural evolution of the marketplace. U.S. patent law requires patents to be sufficiently . The Amazon patent is about as obvious and non-inventive as it gets. The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation, and rejecting patents like this will certainly not have a detrimental effect on the incentive to invent.
With One-Click ordering, Amazon just stores its users’ credit card information and billing address so they can order products with a single click, rather than jumping through a series of confirmation screens. This isn’t innovation-it’s just another online ordering option that any semi-competent web merchant could have thought up. Amazon, once an innovative startup, is starting to act more like a rent-seeking dinosaur when it actually tries to have patents like this enforced. AOL has a patent on instant messaging, but decided not to seek monetary compensation from Yahoo and MSN whose messenger services have become very popular. Does Amazon really think people will start shopping elsewhere if Amazon isn’t the only web retailer with One-Click ordering?
There isn’t even a real intellectual debate on this subject–every reasoned argument I’ve read on the subject of patent reform discusses the absurdity of the current system that rubber-stamps patents like One-click ordering which merely describe a simple, obvious process in complex, technical terms to make it sound like a unique innovation. Most patent reform proposals like the one Congress is considering are just skirting the real issue: patents should be tougher to get, and anyone ought to be able to challenge a patent in a court of law. Until real patent reform comes about, consumers will continue to suffer as big companies bully start-ups, like Verizon which has “dimmed Vonage’s prospects” of offering an innovative, popular VoIP service.
Michael Moore’s “Sicko” - Diagnosis: PWNED
Michael Moore’s new attack-umentary on the American health care system, Sicko, seems to be having viral problems of its own. A mysterious source has uploaded the entire movie to the web, and as a result, it is now freely available for (unauthorized) download by anyone with an Internet connection. Ad Age has the story:
Last week, the Oscar winning director announced that he’d decided to stash a copy of “Sicko” in Canada, in case the Federal government decided to impound it over an apparently unauthorized trip to Cuba made during its filming. As it turns out, the hard part won’t be getting the film released, but getting audiences to pay to see it now that its available for free.
If the breach is as wide as it appears — and this reporter downloaded a copy and watched it late Thursday night with ease — Moore, and his distributor, The Weinstein Company, have a every film maker’s worst marketing nightmare on their hands — how to persuade people to go to the theater to see a show that’s available free on the Internet. (Officials at the Weinstein Company were unavailable for comment late Thursday evening.)
Now, I’m not saying you should definitely download the movie and watch it for free. I am definitely not encouraging all of our readers to board the pirate ship to Sicko-ville and view the film without putting any money in Michael Moore’s pockets. I’m just saying that if you have a non-traditional approach to intellectual property rights, you could go to, say, here and do so. If you really wanted to.
EFF Wrong About iTunes Privacy Concerns
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a story published by the Associate Press last week, says that Apple’s new DRM-Free tracks available through iTunes are raising new privacy concerns. That’s because although DRM (Digital Rights Managment) has been removed from the songs, making it easier to move them between multiple music players and computers, Apple does include customer names and account information in the digital music music files they sell.
Privacy advocates claim that by embedding customer names and account info into songs that it exposes to a greater risk of theft of that private information. However, the only way in which only these music files could be copied or otherwise examined would be through illegal file sharing. Attacks on a system that allowed access to music files would likely also allow access to other files that would be much more appealing to online snoops.
By tagging tracks with user information Apple has done away with the huge problems inherent in DRM, yet it has kept a modicum of honesty in the system. This is a great compromise position that should be applauded.
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