Ben Goldacre asked a great question this weekend in the Guardian. What are patents for? He points out their rather precarious position: on the one hand they aim to incentivise and promote innovation, but on the other render some kinds of essential progress impossible.

All mechanisms for idea ownership have this kind of dilemna hard-coded in to them and he points to an eye-watering example of Indian innovation for HIV medication, that is happening precisely because they are ignoring other nation's patent laws.

'Ignoring patent and licensing issues has allowed Dr Yusuf Hamied, director of Cipla, to innovate. Even though each drug is officially owned by a different company, he could put a common combination of three treatments (Stavudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine) into one simple, single combination pill.

'This increases treatment compliance – it's easier to take your medication correctly – and that keeps you alive longer, while reducing the emergence of resistant strains. Hamied calls his pill Triomune (he also offers "Antiflu", a copy of Tamiflu for the developing world, and many more). In 2001 he was selling it to Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) clinics for $350 per person per year, more than 30 times cheaper than the official versions of these drugs. Triomune is only $87 a year.'

As Ben puts it, 'Hamied is a hero', but as you can imagine not everyone agrees.

This is a perfect example of the trade-off between our rights as owners and our needs as sufferers. But there is an underlying question, one of huge significance for a number of global industries right now. Can there ever be a set of global property laws, what would they look like and how would/could they be enforced?

Ironically, it seems the global media market place of today requires very clear region-ing in order to maximise profit potential. This is as true of the music, film and video games industries as it is with big pharma.

The need to treat each market differently, but also to have one set of IP laws in place leads to some very palpable tensions that do not look like they will be driving innovation or, more importantly, treating people like citizens of the same world.
Justin