The BBC reports about a drug that was available cheaply, got tweaked in a minor way and now available only in a much more expensive format. While the story is not about patenting, it is very similar to it as it is about licensing a drug, in this case for use in the UK, and excluding the old, yet still perfectly effective, drug from use. This is exactly what a patent does, and there are countless examples of pharmaceutical companies doing exactly these very marginal improvements to extract major rents from sick people.

Forbes Article: Going Toe To Toe With Medical Device Giants. Very good article on the economic cost of defending yourself against a patent infringement lawsuit.

Forbes Table Below
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"Intellectual property is a precious asset--if you can afford to protect it.

$10 million Cost to defend a high-stakes patent suit
$3.8 million Median damages awarded in patent infringement cases from 2001-07
482,871 Patent applications filed in 2009
191,927 Patents issued in 2009
2,700 Average number of patent-infringement lawsuits filed per year
$1,000 Hourly rate charged by top patent litigators
100 Average number of patent cases that go to trial each year
57% Percentage of trials won by patent holders
34.6 Average number of months to secure a patent"

Have you closed the security breach yet? There were a lot of those inane comments posted overnight.

And why does the post above this one lack a comment submission form? It just says "Submit Comment" and then nothing. I thought maybe the page was cut off when I loaded it but I reloaded it several times and the rest of the page below the words "Submit Comment" was missing every single time.

The post about the drug does not accurately reflect the original article. The original article says that the unlicensed drug is still available, but the UK medical system requires using a licensed drug when it is available. So, the article is very little to do with patents and very much to do with an inflexible public health care system.

I must ask that people, collectively, not post more than a maximum of 9 comments to this site, total, between successive visits by me (generally several a day during the daylight hours on the west coast of North America; so a maximum of 9 during the west coast night and a maximum of 9 every four hours or so the rest of the time). (I post this now because I see someone has just made at least ten new comments in the course of a single hour.)

Otherwise it is impossible for me to use the Most Recent Comments sidebar to catch up on new comments since my previous visit and I am forced to page back through the last several days' worth of posts clicking every one that shows a non-zero number of comments and checking the date on the bottommost comment on each such post, which takes many minutes.

Although with the generally poor comment quality and low activity at this blog lately I'm becoming sorely tempted to simply delete my bookmark for this site instead.

I feel like I'm often looking for interesting things to read about a variety of subjects, but I manage to include your blog among my reads every day because you have interesting entries that I look forward to. Here's hoping there's a lot more great material coming! Windows 7 Sale

In general, the main results from this theory compare price-fixing methods across market structures, analyse the impact of a certain structure on welfare, and play with different variations of technological/demand assumptions in order to assess its consequences on the abstract model of society. Most economic textbooks follow the practice of carefully explaining the perfect competition model, only because of its usefulness to understand "departures" from it (the so called imperfect competition models). Mark Taylor,1z1-549 certified