Here in Geneva at the World Health Organization’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, there is a really bad idea floating around.
There is a small group of neo-Marxist activists who don’t like intellectual property (IP). Having lost the Marxist battle against real property rights many years ago, these neo-Marxists carry on the fight against intellectual property.
In essence they want to eliminate the economic incentives—the heart of capitalism—that propel individuals and companies to innovate and create, primarily because they see economic incentives as evil. In Geneva, that IP angst manifests itself in the loathing of patents.
Oh, they won’t say exactly that, but that’s what they mean.
The problem is that the anti-IP crowd knows that eliminating patents would destroy any inducement for individuals and companies to pour money into research and developing new drugs. So they might rid the world of evil patents (their goal), but then there would be no new medicines to battle disease—including those that devastate developing countries.
So they have come up with a proposal to promote research and development in their post-IP world, generally dubbed the Medical R&D Treaty.
Countries that signed on to the treaty would kick money into a general pot ($100 million is often cited), which would become a prize fund for the development of new drugs. That is, if the United Nations committee overseeing the awards thought the new drug was worthy of a prize.
The inventor would, in theory, get a financial reward up front, but would forgo any patent rights.
And where would the $100 million come from? From U.N. member countries, of course. And U.S.(i.e., taxpayers) would, of course, be asked to bear a disproportionate share.
To be clear, IPI doesn’t in principle mind prize money being awarded to inventors of new drugs. There are other programs that have offered prize money as an inducement toward innovation. But by and large the successful ones have been sponsored by private companies and organizations, not by governments.
But what should be clear to anyone who has looked at the history of such prizes is that prizes are not primarily responsible for funding and spurring innovation—especially when it’s a product like prescription drugs that are very capital and labor intensive.
Prizes can be beneficial in focusing public attention for those already trying to invent product. But a prize system can’t and won’t replace the current property rights based innovation model. It’s a fool’s errand doomed to failure.
But then we did say it was being driven by neo-Marxists.