Re: [OS:N:] Does "Intellectual Property" beg the question?

On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 08:25:55 at 08:25:55AM -0400, Paul D. Fernhout ([email protected]) wrote:

> For example, millions of people in Africa are dying annually of
> curable diseases because of drug patents making drugs inaccessible
> financially. Common medical problems worldwide (malaria, river
> blindness) are not being addressed significantly by drug researchers
> who focus mainly on "me too" clones of financially succesful drugs
> (e.g. the next Viagra). We spend time discussing this issue instead
> of creating more free content and more free software.

How are the two things related? I can write a Free tutorial on Perl
Programming, a meaningless blog or the next Unix with one relatively
cheap computer in my house, with any possible license. Even if I were
a specialized doctor, I couldn't study malaria, produce or test
malaria drugs in my living room. I already said in another answer that
drugs are a problem in a very different way than the rules on books,
songs and such. Unless you talk of writing with a Free license an
academic level report on how malaria transmits itself.

Considering that only full time professionals with labs available
could write it without doing any damage and only would be full time
professionals could take advantage of it, what is the link again?

Heck, I finally managed to bring this back to courseware...
(note that the above has nothing to do with the formats in which that
report should be distributed, which, I agree, should be Free ones)

Ciao,
	Marco Fioretti

-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

Be the change you want to see in the world - Gandhi


_______________________________________________
Subscription and Archive: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-source-now-list/
-
For K12OS technical help join K12OSN:
<https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn>