More consequences of our broken intellectual property law: develop a new drug, get a patent, all well and good. But what pharmaceutical companies do is then, when the patent is about to run out, change a radical at one point on the molecule, find that it still works, take out another patent on essentially the same discovery, and repeat over and over, touting the “new” drug on which they have a new government granted monopoly as the latest and “best” method for treating whatever.
In the case of Nexium and Prilosec, they just repatented and started marketing one chirality of a pair of mirror image molecules instead of a mixture of both chiralities—and it’s not clear that there is any advantage of using only the one chirality, to anyone other than the drug company, that is.
“More consequences of our broken intellectual property law”
I can’t seem to persuade anyone of the validity of my notion of patent and copyright violation as civil disobedience, but I believe in it strongly.