Ian, I have not seen this study but similar ones show that the one
industry that relies most heavily on patents is the pharmaceutical
business.
****************
Michael,
I hope you go into that in your next masterpiece! :-)
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,437212,00.html> In September 1999, it was pointed out to the director of the NIH, Harold Varmus, that six HIV/Aids drugs, as well as anti-malarial treatments and other medicines of vital interest to developing countries, had been invented with public funds. The government therefore had the right under US law to use the drugs in public health initiatives.
Dr Varmus dismissed the suggestion, echoing the industry line that: "Undermining licensed intellectual property rights would, I believe, unnecessarily jeopardise the development of important therapeutic drugs."
James Love, who runs a Washington-based group called the Consumer Project on Technology, sees the response as nonsensical because it was the NIH which did the hard work of discovering and synthesising the drugs in question. "The rest of the world will have to go however many years more of paying an astronomical sum for something invented by the United States government," he said. "How can we expect Glaxo to share its intellectual property if the United States government won't share its intellectual property to save millions of people. What does that say about the moral character of the American public. We are responsible."
[could a clearer case of the state as protection racket be made-aside from weaponry, of course]
Ian