Patents - protecting your money and your life

Downloading pirated songs from the internet is cool. Dying from counterfeit medicine is not. But the pirates and the slack law enforcement that give you the first also give you the second. And many Governments and humanitarian groups will tell you this is a good thing.

Brazil, Kenya, Thailand, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organisation say patents deprive the poor of important medicines and should be discarded in the name of public health.

In fact, patents brought those drugs into existence, along with millions of other products, wonderful and mundane. The slogan, "patients over patents", will hurt poor patients the most by depriving them of new inventions.

Say you are an unknown band, performing in bars. You wrote a few good pieces and your audiences like them. Suddenly your songs have been recorded and patented by someone else with no mention of you and no royalties. How would you feel?

You are a researcher or academic. You presented a paper to a conference. A few months later, you see a study published in some journal with most of your argument - your methodology, scientific model, data, results and conclusions. How would you feel?

You invented a device that can reduce fuel consumption in diesel motors by 35 per cent and you're selling it for a few bucks because you don't have a wide marketing network, or you don't have the capacity for mass production. Then, a few months later, your device, with a slightly revised design and exterior, is patented by someone who is selling it at a handsome price, with no mention of you. How would you feel?

And how do consumers feel when they get fakes and rip-offs? If you buy a pirated book or CD and it turns out to be of bad quality, you only lose your money. But if you buy pirated medicine, you can lose your health -- even your life.

This year Kenya found 20,000 counterfeit doses of anti-malarial Duo-cotecxin, one of many counterfeits in an uncontrolled market where some 35,000 people die of malaria each year. The fake, probably from China, do not just fail to cure the disease, they can increase drug resistance and make patients worse.

The WHO says that up to 30 per cent of the medicine sold in Africa is fake and that counterfeiting is a $32 billion global business and growing fast.

And it's not just poor countries that suffer. Just after last Christmas, 57-year-old Marcia Bergeron became Canada's first casualty of counterfeit drugs purchased from the Web, according to a British Columbia coroner. The drugs from Eastern Europe contained aluminium and arsenic.

In the US, fake anaemia, diabetes and cholesterol products have set off massive product recalls in the last few years.

But the guilty parties are not just individuals trying to get rich quick. Governments are at it too. Some do not protect intellectual property, some are too corrupt to enforce what laws they do have and some decide that they too are going to infringe patents and make their own copies.

Thailand has long been a haven for commercial pirates churning out fake Gucci bags and Rolex watches but the Government too has issued Compulsory Licences to copy patented foreign drugs, claiming that the poor need cheap versions. One of their attempts at an AIDS drug has significantly increased resistance to drugs, harming patients and helping the disease to spread.

And now the WHO is proposing a treaty that would remove patents from companies and have R&D controlled by officials -- all in the name of cutting prices.

Governments around the world like to play the hero by promising to reduce prices, usually by price controls or patent infringement but rarely by cutting taxes. South Africa slaps 14 per cent sales tax on medicines, Indonesia charges more than 20 per cent and Ethiopia's state distributor "generally charges 20-40 per cent wholesale mark-up on imported medicines," WHO reports show.

If a Government wants to bring down the price of medicines, rice, clothing, fertilisers, farm machinery, or anything essential to life and economic growth, the first thing should be to abolish the import duties and sales taxes that hit the poor hardest, not to abolish patents.

The civil contracts of intellectual property, like deeds to physical property, underpin innovation, creativity and growth, as well as personal and political freedoms.

Activists claim that breaking drug patents would hit the, mainly American, multinationals of "Big Pharma" the hardest. True enough, but it's the poor who will suffer the most from bad products and economic stagnation.