Top 12 notes on a free market

A selection of quotations noted at yesterday’s conference on intellectual property rights in Johannesburg, hosted by the Free Market Foundation and the International Policy Network. Some are verbatim from notes, but a few have been completed from memory. I’ve tried to be as true to the original, or failing that it’s intended meaning, as possible. Read on for my top 12 quotations:

Alec van Gelder, research fellow at the IPN:

Ninety-eight percent of WHO’s Essential Medicines List is off-patent.

The [Food and Drug Administration] has done more harm to the American people than any other government organisation.

In India, Indira Gandhi dropped intellectual property rights in an attempt to make healthcare more accessible to the poor. For 35 years, nothing happened. Then India reinstated intellectual property rights protection, and pharmaceutical companies came trooping in.

James Ringer, MD, Lilly South Africa:

We’re losing jobs in the pharmaceutical industry because regulatory delays makes the period of exclusivity shorter and the cost of labour is rising, yet products are price-controlled.

Revenue matches or exceeds R&D costs for only three out of ten prescription drugs.

Microsoft’s Mark Lange, on the 283 patents it claims (based on research by Open Source Risk Management, a seller of patent risk insurance) Linux may infringe, but which it won’t identify:

Of course they exist!

Leon Louw, executive quotation maker of the Free Market Foundation:

If we had an anti-business rally here, this place would be full of singing, dancing, screeching — and naked — people.

I hire and fire the world’s largest organisations daily, at a whim. They have no power over me. They’re at my mercy, and al they can do is beg and plead for my business.

Competition law is strange. It says compete, but don’t win. If you charge more than your competitor, it’s gouging. If you charge less, it’s predatory. And if you charge the same, it’s collusion. I don’t know what else to charge.

Until the 19th century, intellectual property rights were protected by common law — contract law. At first it appears to be a good idea to codify common law into statutory law, but if you look at IPR law, it only creates arbitrary definitions and confusion. That’s what you get when you move away from principle, morals and common law, to explicit legislation.

There’s not enough consultation on law, and Parliament is merely a rubber stamp for laws written [by the executive] in Pretoria. That’s a legacy of Apartheid that has been adopted without much thought by the current government.

If you look at the etymology of the word “patent”, it means “open”.