I'll say. If a western government tried to enforce much of the stuff that can be implicated, they'd be impeached in a week.Colour-Scientist said:
SAY NO TO ACTA.
- Thread starter jcj94
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As appalling as this is, I feel like it's not going to get too much ground, especially if it can restrict generic drugs. As soon as major groups like AARP and whatnot get wind of this, they will not be happy about that. Still, this one seems worth keeping an eye on. This is going into my favorites.
Ah yes, the United States of Hypocrisy. How fitting. Regardless, I live in Canada so how does that effect me? ...oh wait.jcj94 said:
yeah this.ZeroMachine said:
honestly if it DID pass in the U.S., you bet your silly ass i'd turn into some V for Vendetta style ninja militia where we blow their organizations headquarters to kingdom come.
You obviously have never heard of the Lisbon Treaty.ZeroMachine said:
OT: Sounds pretty dodgy, but I'd like to know more about it than just what some Frenchman tells me it'll do.
Patents are a necessary part of life. You don't like them, but they are necessary. Drug companies don't magically create drugs out of thin air. Years and years and years and years and HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS is spent researching new medical drugs. R&D doesn't run on fairy dust. And as regulations on efficacy grow tighter, the cost for research will climb ever higher. There are some drugs these days have cost as much as A BILLION DOLLARS to research, test, market and manufacture. Actually manufacturing is not the expensive part - but the research? That's incredibly expensive, and unless you don't want any safety testing, it will remain incredibly expensive.
So you get companies that take HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLAR GAMBLES on new compounds and drugs. Sometimes the drug doesn't past the tests and never gets released - BAM, all that money goes down the drain. Sometimes another company beats them to it, and BAM - all that money has been wasted. Researching and Making new drugs is an INCREDIBLY, INCREDIBLY RISKY business. It often takes 1.5 to 2 decades to successfully discover a drug, test it, refine it, and distribute it. You have drugs hitting the market only today that were first discovered in the early 90s.
Companies spend billions researching drugs. They HAVE to make the money back. Generic drug companies have their heart in the right place - but the reason they can give the drugs out so cheaply is because they didn't actually do any of the research. They are basically taking someone else's invention and making a profit of it by undercutting the original discoverers.
Governments don't fund the scientists enough to replace corporations. Charities don't donate enough either. I'm sorry, but unless you are willing for the government to spend billions upon billions of dollars on our research (which I would welcome wholeheartedly), corporations are here to stay.
And everything I've said can be applied to GMOs. They ain't easy to cheap to research. Cheap to copy and make, but not to create.
Until the government steps in and funds all out medical research and projects, we need to depend on companies. They have to get paid. Our PCR machines and Laminar Flow Cabinets are not cheap. Our reagents and plasmids and sequencers don't run on fairy dust. Scientists don't like getting paid with Monopoly Money. It takes BILLIONS to research these drugs and prove their efficacy - the companies HAVE to make that back, OR THEY GO BROKE. And THEN who do you get to research and discover your drugs? The generic manufacturers? They couldn't do it even if they tried.
Of course, it is also immoral to let people die because they are poor. This is why governments have to work with companies to provide medicine for the poor. Don't blame the biotech corporations for the price of the drug - they spent their investor's money making it, they have to get that money back.
Generic Drug manufacturers could kill the biotech industry. Some of you would cheer for that - but you know what? They made the drugs and the GMOs. Without those companies, those products and drugs and treatments WOULDN'T EXIST. AT ALL. Would it kill you to show a little gratitude?
Patents are necessary - scientific research doesn't run on a few pennies and happy thoughts. It takes VAST resources, VAST amounts of money and, as always, results are NOT guaranteed. Don't get me wrong - I'd love it if the government would fund all our labs and pay our salaries and then we could distribute the medicines for cheap. I would love to live in a world where that was possible.
It isn't. Not yet at any rate.
Generic Drug Manufacturers aren't the solution to the world's problem - without the big name companies doing the research for them, they wouldn't even exist. Generic Manufacturers depend on bigger and better and brighter companies to do the work for them, but then they want to undercut and destroy them?
Fine. We'll see who invents your drugs when they're gone. You want to live in a world without corporations? Better be prepared to pay extremely high taxes, since science ain't cheap.
So you get companies that take HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLAR GAMBLES on new compounds and drugs. Sometimes the drug doesn't past the tests and never gets released - BAM, all that money goes down the drain. Sometimes another company beats them to it, and BAM - all that money has been wasted. Researching and Making new drugs is an INCREDIBLY, INCREDIBLY RISKY business. It often takes 1.5 to 2 decades to successfully discover a drug, test it, refine it, and distribute it. You have drugs hitting the market only today that were first discovered in the early 90s.
Companies spend billions researching drugs. They HAVE to make the money back. Generic drug companies have their heart in the right place - but the reason they can give the drugs out so cheaply is because they didn't actually do any of the research. They are basically taking someone else's invention and making a profit of it by undercutting the original discoverers.
Governments don't fund the scientists enough to replace corporations. Charities don't donate enough either. I'm sorry, but unless you are willing for the government to spend billions upon billions of dollars on our research (which I would welcome wholeheartedly), corporations are here to stay.
And everything I've said can be applied to GMOs. They ain't easy to cheap to research. Cheap to copy and make, but not to create.
Until the government steps in and funds all out medical research and projects, we need to depend on companies. They have to get paid. Our PCR machines and Laminar Flow Cabinets are not cheap. Our reagents and plasmids and sequencers don't run on fairy dust. Scientists don't like getting paid with Monopoly Money. It takes BILLIONS to research these drugs and prove their efficacy - the companies HAVE to make that back, OR THEY GO BROKE. And THEN who do you get to research and discover your drugs? The generic manufacturers? They couldn't do it even if they tried.
Of course, it is also immoral to let people die because they are poor. This is why governments have to work with companies to provide medicine for the poor. Don't blame the biotech corporations for the price of the drug - they spent their investor's money making it, they have to get that money back.
Generic Drug manufacturers could kill the biotech industry. Some of you would cheer for that - but you know what? They made the drugs and the GMOs. Without those companies, those products and drugs and treatments WOULDN'T EXIST. AT ALL. Would it kill you to show a little gratitude?
Patents are necessary - scientific research doesn't run on a few pennies and happy thoughts. It takes VAST resources, VAST amounts of money and, as always, results are NOT guaranteed. Don't get me wrong - I'd love it if the government would fund all our labs and pay our salaries and then we could distribute the medicines for cheap. I would love to live in a world where that was possible.
It isn't. Not yet at any rate.
Generic Drug Manufacturers aren't the solution to the world's problem - without the big name companies doing the research for them, they wouldn't even exist. Generic Manufacturers depend on bigger and better and brighter companies to do the work for them, but then they want to undercut and destroy them?
Fine. We'll see who invents your drugs when they're gone. You want to live in a world without corporations? Better be prepared to pay extremely high taxes, since science ain't cheap.
Can't tell if sarcastic. Regardless I don't know what you mean by 'good political ideas' I think our political system is shit.jcj94 said:
See, I agree with that entire thing. HOWEVER, ACTA is entirly overkill, getting rid of the affordable options. And Tylonal isn't (rarely) more than 60 cents more expensive then the knockoffs, and is still more effective, you get the same ammount, but more 'effect' of the drug. It lasts 4 hours, instead of a 2 hour knockoff pill. So you get more for your money in the LONG run with Tylonal, but then if you don't have the 60 extra cents (wich, when your a penny pinching family of 7, with 1 person working, and living between paychecks, you kinda have to keep what money you get), you can get the generic brands. The generic brands also are there to keep something called a free market economy going. Without generics, we would loose ALL control over the price of drugs. This would make the drug price, as well as any other copy-written industry, go sky-high. There are pros and cons to each side of this battle. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices.Korolev said:
Remember people, I'm a 15 year old kid debating on this, and yeah, this doesn't say much for the world we live in, but if a few kids can realize that politics are starting to turn the worlds free reign into a form of dictatorial government, then that shows that people need to be worried as well. This would put severe dampeners on things such as MUSIC. You couldn't put music videos on YouTube without YouTube blatantly finding a way to prevent you from downloading them at all. Look at how YouTube sends videos. You 'download' the video to a temporary file location and view it using a plugin. This is how YouTube download programs work, they just request the file and store it elsewhere so that it isn't deleted upon leaving the website. YouTube would have to create its own plugin and encryption system in order to watch videos. ANY videos if they kept music videos up. If they get rid of music and movie videos, then they wouldn't really have to worry unless someone makes some copy-write protected building in Minecraft or something and posts it on YouTube.
This will have a very long lasting impact on the way the internet works if it passes.
http://www.ustr.gov/actaboyvirgo666 said:
Problem is that it didn't "have to pass" anything. This wasn't a bill being sent through congress or anything, it was a trade agreement. Meaning no one really had a say except the administration, the ambassador involved is a presidential appointee.
How the hell would they even enforce something like this? There's really no internet police system to absolutely insure that "copyrighted content" isn't distributed. Moreover, devoting time and resources to policing the internet would be a waste. People will find a way to thwart this if it comes to pass.
ALRIGHT!Colin Laws said:
We get the message!
If anything nobody is going to listen to you because you're clearly biased in this situation...
Just saying, nobody will take you seriously, the things you're saying could be true, but you don't present them as such.
This is why i'm never sure if i should be angered, scared or reassured.
Can someboy explain to me, in simple terms, what this act does and where it has been passed and who is considering it?
All the generic pills on the market aren't infringing on patents, the patents have expired when the generic brand becomes available. There isn't some nefarious underground black market where off-label Tylenol is being flooded onto the market (well, there is a black market of generic drugs but they aren't the ones that end up being sold at the local mini-mart).Korolev said:
Most drug patents last 10-15 years as well, so the pharmaceutical company has usually made back it's investment 10-fold by the time the generic hits the market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_drug#When_a_generic_drug_can_be_produced
ACTA won't actually affect any of this, that was just alarmist bullshit. Which is a shame because ACTA is a disgrace and making shit up isn't going to help anyone.