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Lodsys Free to Continue Patent Threats Against Developers After Judge Tosses Apple's Legal Challenge
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The US government can't d anything about this patent troll, as the US government just collapsed. As bad and evil as lodsys are there are bigger issues at hand. Actually having good bills passed in the US government and ending the pissing match between the democrats and republicans.
The FDA needs to go away too; then companies wouldn't have to waste all that money greasing the palms of some administrative bureaucrats. They would still subject their products to whatever testing their customer based demanded because if they didn't, nobody would buy their products. The market should set the rules, not some corrupt government agencies that don't represent the market at all. Then companies could develop products with much smaller investments without the annoying gov agencies to harass them.
I do "get it". I understand add-on's, however £69.99 for a gem pack for an iOS "game" is a joke. Don't bother coming back with development cost nonsense either.
Rockstars GTA 5 was released with a reported development budget of US$265 million. The game cost £35 on Amazon and will top US$2 billion take very soon. So how can you justify £69.99 for a gem pack on an inferior iOS device?
Your talk about Adults and passcodes is misleading. As a developer, your tactic with IAP's is opportunist at the very least. You know that there are also adults who are not always able to make the right choices. For example, those with addictive personality types or mental deficiency. The very same people who become gambling addicts, alcoholics and those who run up £1000's of debt, even though they are aware.
You also know as well as anybody in sales does (if they are honest about it), is that the best and easiest sales are to those for whom you can most easily persuade, or are the least aware. In fact a good salesman tells you what you only what you need to know to be able to sell a product and will answer your questions about it with the least risk to the sale as possible.
If you are happy with your co-Dev's ripping people off (and it sounds like you are), with your over inflated IAP's, then simply factor in the 4% [or so] for the 'patent licence' or otherwise, 'legal challenge' to your income. Like I have said, I have no sympathy, neither do I care for your position regarding the validity of the patent, as both sides are manipulating the system.
However, you can easily solve this issue by charging what your App is really worth at purchase, instead of conning (er....., sorry giving people the choice) people into paying more for your product than it is worth. Just like 'real games developers' like Rockstar do.
Hold on a minute....., you won't because why charge everybody 99p - £5.99 when you can charge everybody from £2.99 - £69.99 a time for multiple IAP's over the coming days, weeks and months? Forget 'Patent Trolls', we need to focus on the 'IAP Trolls'.
I seem to have touched a nerve and if I have, then it is probably because you are perhaps an IAP Troll yourself.
It also, sounds like you are the one who needs to grow up and has issues, clearly not moral ones though. You also tell me to grow-up and then use the word "Duh" LOL!
As for rage? I have not expressed rage, only an opinion you will need to try harder to denigrate.
You are wrong. That decision was about "standard essential patents" issued under FRAND terms - basically, a patent holder has already agreed to license the patent to anyone who wants it under fair and reasonable terms. Therefore, in case of disagreement the most a patent holder should expect is fair and reasonable payment, and the ability to ban a product from being imported would be absolutely excessive (for example, Google demanded several billion dollars from Microsoft for FRAND patents and the court finally ordered Microsoft to pay a few (single digit) million dollars instead of several billion - banning a product from being imported while the court decides about this would be excessive.
In this case, Apple isn't actually threatened by this patent at all. Who is threatened is small software developers who develop software for iOS, Android or both. Apple has a paid for and irrevocable license for the patents in question. Both Apple and Google seem to be equally disgusted with Lodsys and tried to raise the cost for Lodsys in different ways. Google is attacking the patent's validity; Apple attacked by saying that iOS developers only use the patent as far as it is already built into iOS, for which Apple has a license.
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I think what makes a patent troll a patent troll is that their victims don't pay for the value of the invention, but to make lawsuits go away.
While clinical trials do cost a lot of money, simply restructuring the safety and efficacy evaluations alone will not make drug investments worthwhile without a patent system. Instead of losing $4 billion, we may be down in the sub 1$ billion range, but again, how would that be justifiable? Any investment, big or small, would NOT have an appreciable ROI if a generics company can copy your therapeutic as soon as you hit the market. That's exactly what (medical) patents cover -- exclusive market rights. No VC or angel investor would drop even a few million if there's no chance for major renumeration.
If pharma companies can't make enough profit to justify an initial investment without the help of artificially inflated prices, then it means they're making too many drugs. The patent system si subsidizing the entire industry to spend way more money on developing new drugs than is optimal. What they should be investing their money in is ways to product their existing drugs for less money - that's something a generics company won't be able to instantly exploit. The time for a new drug is when the demand becomes high enough that even generics companies will sell it for a large enough margin. And anyway brand power can be worth a large price increase. How many people buy generic cola or use no-name search engines?
You are incredibly ill-informed about the scientific process and drug development. Did you not read my comment?
They're not "making too many drugs." Hardly. It's actually quite the opposite -- there's many, many failures. 1 in 100 lead compounds (not even going to mention biologics...) will make it through the clinic -- and that's a very CONSERVATIVE estimate. Medicine is incredibly complicated. You don't just sit down and crap out a drug while on a 12h science binge. Hundreds of thousands of molecules fail at various stages for a plethora of reasons -- most of which are not predictable or easily solvable. You clearly don't know the science so I can't have that discussion with you, but ADME/Tox usually kills most products. We could have a conversation about better screening and hit to lead, but tightening up the R&D process would not alleviate this particular profit differential. It's inherent to the field -- there is fixed, unpredictable variability in the discovery and development process until we as a species learn MUCH, MUCH more. Maybe 100 years from now.
What this means is that every successful drug produced comes with a fairly fixed cost -- the total cost of all other failures to get to that one clinical success. This is your investment cost, your price to buy in. If you're an investor, you want a return on your investment. If anything, MORE money should be spent. If you spend far less, as you so (blindly) rally for, there's no guarantee you'll have ANY drugs at all, statistically speaking. If you spend 1/100th of a traditional drug cost on R&D, you're likely to just waste that money.
Incorrect. If you read my posts and understand the process, the main cost isn't manufacturing -- it's all the R&D required to reach that drug candidate. Making (most) drugs is fairly cheap and easy once you know what chemical matter you desire. The kicker to your comment? Generics companies SPECIALIZE in reducing production cost. That's their business model! They do NO R&D and therefore have NONE of those costs -- they essentially steal someone else's ideas and investments and produce the same therapeutic target, priced lower. Once other generics get in the game, process development is used to slice out more profit margins as the avg price plummets.
Once generics companies get in the game (as you propose from t=0), it's a race to the bottom. Sounds great for the consumer, right? Wrong. It makes every R&D investment useless, since the costs aren't in manufacturing. Furthermore, the race to the bottom actually ends up killing some viable therapeutics, because the profit margins are so small even generics companies don't want to produce them. This makes certain approved therapeutics hard to find.
The time for a new drug (in a new market) is when there's a clinical need, yes, which can be hard to predict given the long lead times on R&D (10 years). There may not be that demand 10 years from your start date, and even with those margins, keep in mind that it's ALWAYS a race to the bottom. You simply cannot remunerate R&D costs, as discussed above. If we consider a developed market, your comment is chalked full of fallacies. If there's sufficient demand for a drug, let's say Viagra, more generics will pile on. This will result in price wars and DECREASED profit margins, since these companies are NOT in collusion. Look at Viagra and Cialis (both off patent) -- the demand is huge but the price is low. There's no desire to develop more ED drugs here -- there's plenty of generics out there. This means that both existing and new markets fail to incentivise based on demand, since profits cannot offset the investment costs.
I really think you misunderstand the discovery process. You simply don't sit on your magical chemical throne and wish for new drugs to appear in a particularly valuable or hot market. There's zero guarantee of successful product development, hence the constant R&D, and development times are long. Such is science. It's an incredibly complicated field and simply assuming that one can crap out a product in 3 years like a tech company is factually incorrect.
Incorrect again. Brand power does not translate into medicine. If I asked random people on the street the pros and cons of Merck, Eli Lilly, Novo, GSK, Pfizer, etc they couldn't tell me jack ****. Doctors prescribe medicines -- it's not a consumer driven market because consumers are ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. Most doctors will prescribe generics since they're cheaper, and the only time a name-brand is prescribed post-patent window is typically because of some sort of kickback or allegiance to the relevant company, not brand power.
Given all this, it should be quite evident why patents are essential to certain high-tech industries. It's either that, or no medicine at all
You are incredibly ill-informed about the scientific process and drug development. Did you not read my comment?
They're not "making too many drugs." Hardly. It's actually quite the opposite -- there's many, many failures. 1 in 100 lead compounds (not even going to mention biologics...) will make it through the clinic -- and that's a very CONSERVATIVE estimate. Medicine is incredibly complicated. You don't just sit down and crap out a drug while on a 12h science binge. Hundreds of thousands of molecules fail at various stages for a plethora of reasons -- most of which are not predictable or easily solvable. You clearly don't know the science so I can't have that discussion with you, but ADME/Tox usually kills most products. We could have a conversation about better screening and hit to lead, but tightening up the R&D process would not alleviate this particular profit differential. It's inherent to the field -- there is fixed, unpredictable variability in the discovery and development process until we as a species learn MUCH, MUCH more. Maybe 100 years from now.
What this means is that every successful drug produced comes with a fairly fixed cost -- the total cost of all other failures to get to that one clinical success. This is your investment cost, your price to buy in. If you're an investor, you want a return on your investment. If anything, MORE money should be spent. If you spend far less, as you so (blindly) rally for, there's no guarantee you'll have ANY drugs at all, statistically speaking. If you spend 1/100th of a traditional drug cost on R&D, you're likely to just waste that money.
Incorrect. If you read my posts and understand the process, the main cost isn't manufacturing -- it's all the R&D required to reach that drug candidate. Making (most) drugs is fairly cheap and easy once you know what chemical matter you desire. The kicker to your comment? Generics companies SPECIALIZE in reducing production cost. That's their business model! They do NO R&D and therefore have NONE of those costs -- they essentially steal someone else's ideas and investments and produce the same therapeutic target, priced lower. Once other generics get in the game, process development is used to slice out more profit margins as the avg price plummets.
Once generics companies get in the game (as you propose from t=0), it's a race to the bottom. Sounds great for the consumer, right? Wrong. It makes every R&D investment useless, since the costs aren't in manufacturing. Furthermore, the race to the bottom actually ends up killing some viable therapeutics, because the profit margins are so small even generics companies don't want to produce them. This makes certain approved therapeutics hard to find.
The time for a new drug (in a new market) is when there's a clinical need, yes, which can be hard to predict given the long lead times on R&D (10 years). There may not be that demand 10 years from your start date, and even with those margins, keep in mind that it's ALWAYS a race to the bottom. You simply cannot remunerate R&D costs, as discussed above. If we consider a developed market, your comment is chalked full of fallacies. If there's sufficient demand for a drug, let's say Viagra, more generics will pile on. This will result in price wars and DECREASED profit margins, since these companies are NOT in collusion. Look at Viagra and Cialis (both off patent) -- the demand is huge but the price is low. There's no desire to develop more ED drugs here -- there's plenty of generics out there. This means that both existing and new markets fail to incentivise based on demand, since profits cannot offset the investment costs.
I really think you misunderstand the discovery process. You simply don't sit on your magical chemical throne and wish for new drugs to appear in a particularly valuable or hot market. There's zero guarantee of successful product development, hence the constant R&D, and development times are long. Such is science. It's an incredibly complicated field and simply assuming that one can crap out a product in 3 years like a tech company is factually incorrect.
Incorrect again. Brand power does not translate into medicine. If I asked random people on the street the pros and cons of Merck, Eli Lilly, Novo, GSK, Pfizer, etc they couldn't tell me jack ****. Doctors prescribe medicines -- it's not a consumer driven market because consumers are ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. Most doctors will prescribe generics since they're cheaper, and the only time a name-brand is prescribed post-patent window is typically because of some sort of kickback or allegiance to the relevant company, not brand power.
Given all this, it should be quite evident why patents are essential to certain high-tech industries. It's either that, or no medicine at all
No medicine at all? Please. People have been studying and producing medicine since the dawn of human history, The only thing that would happen is that the (relatively) smaller drug producers and generics companies would fold or merge, just as happens in any other business that is deregulated, like the airlines. Nothing wrong with that, because those companies were being propped up by artificially inflated monopoly pricing to begin with. With less competition there would be less of a race to the bottom.
With respect to brand power, sure nobody knows anything about the drug makers but they know the names of their products. If doctors control the market, why do drug makers advertise their prescription-only products so relentlessly during prime time? People go to their doctor and ask about a product they saw on tv, and what is the doctor going to do, turn down a sale?
The biggest problem with patents is that they don't even work. People always find their way around IP laws because they are subjective and arbitrary. There's always a way to make some trivial change to find a loophole around almost any patent Only a tiny fraction of the money that changes hands over patents has anything to do with inventors recouping R&D costs. The rest is all patent trolls, lawyers, frivolous patents. It's a government-controlled industry of scams, shams, collusion, and every other bad thing that is associated with crony capitalism. It's a disgrace to free market economics.
Wow, this has to be one of the most naive statements I have ever seen. Let's just trust the drug companies to do the right thing - and totally ignore the myriad of examples to the contrary. While we are at it, let's get rid of the SEC, Comptroller of the Currency, and FDIC because we can all trust the banking industry and wall street to do the right thing too.
Do you even read this stuff before you post it?
You know why you can trust drug companies to do the right thing? Because if they don't, people like you won't buy their products, and they damn well know it. The only difference between my suggestion and the way things are right now is that the actual market of consumers would be collectively deciding what "the right thing" is, instead of a few ivory tower aristocrats appointed to the FDA by practitioners of crony capitalism like the President and Congress, whoever they may be at any particular time.
That's an excellent idea for the exact same reasons I specified above. In that scenario, the incentive to do the right thing would be increased profit. Right now, the only incentive or profit is to grease the palms of regulators to tell everyone that banking and drug companies are doing the right thing, regardless of whether or not it's actually happening. They have monopolized all regulation of these industries and therefore there is no way for companies to put their corrupt asses out of business by submitting themselves to market-based regulation.
The only one who's naive is you because you seem to think that non-democratically-appointed oligarchical regulators with monopoly power are somehow more likely to do the right thing than for-profit third-party regulators whose ability to exist depends on how much trust they can generate with consumers by having a track record of effective regulation.