India and the Patent Wars: Pharmaceuticals in the New Intellectual Property Regime

[Excerpt] India and the Patent Wars contributes to an international debate over the costs of medicine and restrictions on access under stringent patent laws showing how activists and drug companies in low-income countries seize agency and exert influence over these processes. Murphy Halliburton contributes to analyses of globalization within the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, and public health by drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with pharmaceutical producers in India and the United States. India has been at the center of emerging controversies around patent rights related to pharmaceutical production and local medical knowledge. Halliburton shows that Big Pharma is not all-powerful, and that local activists and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, have been able to undermine the aspirations of multinational companies and the WTO. Halliburton traces how key drug prices have gone down, not up, in low-income countries under the new patent regime through partnerships between US- and India-based companies, but warns us to be aware of access to essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries going forward

Religion, Mathematics and Nothing

The concept of "nothing" is important in both mathematics and theology. Its most obvious use in mathematics is in the number zero which arrived in Western Europe in the 12th Century. In theology it features significantly in the dogma of creaho ex nihilo, which was taught by a Council in 1215 c.e. Noting the relative proximity of these two events leads to the research task described in this essay: an exploration of the influence of mathematics on theology, with respect to the notion of nothing

The Design of Post-Grant Patent Challenges

This paper proposes a patent challenge mechanism with partial patent rights previously granted to the patent-holder as the challenge reward. Transferring patent rights to a successful challenger raises the incentive to search for patent-defeating prior art, and, after the discovery of the information, helps deter collusion between the patent-holder and the challenger. It also reduces costly opportunistic patenting and therefore improves patent application quality. However, from an ex post point of view, over-search ensues when the collusion problem is severe. The optimal re-allocation of patent rights, then, calls for a careful balance between these costs and benefits

Religion, Mathematics and Nothing

The concept of "nothing" is important in both mathematics and theology. Its most obvious use in mathematics is in the number zero which arrived in Western Europe in the 12th Century. In theology it features significantly in the dogma of creaho ex nihilo, which was taught by a Council in 1215 c.e. Noting the relative proximity of these two events leads to the research task described in this essay: an exploration of the influence of mathematics on theology, with respect to the notion of nothing

Uncovering GPTS with Patent Data

This paper asks the question: Can we see evidence of General Purpose Technologies in patent data? Using data on three million US patents granted between 1967 and 1999, and their citations received between 1975 and 2002, we construct a number of measures of GPTs, including generality, number of citations, and patent class growth, for patents themselves and for the patents that cite the patents. A selection of the top twenty patents in the tails of the distribution of several of these measures yields a set of mostly ICT technologies, of which the most important are those underlying transactions on the internet and object-oriented software. We conclude with a brief discussion of the problems we encountered in developing our measures and suggestions for future work in this area.

Aesthetics into the Twenty-first Century

The new concerns facing aestheticians in the twenty-first century require serious attention if the discipline is to maintain continued viability as an intellectual discipline. Just as art changes as cultures develop, so must aesthetics. In support of this view is a personal account of evolving engagement with aesthetics and the factors that led to embracing change and a plurality of practices as essential to the health of aesthetic today. A brief examination of the state of aesthetics as it has evolved in the American Society for Aesthetics since its inception in the 1940s will follow. These two lines of development, one idiosyncratic and personal, and the other focusing on the aims and outcomes of one prominent national society, will perhaps offer some useful background for understanding the current state of aesthetics and the problems confronting the discipline today. Following these considerations will be a look at some of the main concerns reflected in the social and political aesthetics and the expansion of aesthetics to include the popular arts which again challenges aesthetics to move beyond its historic boundaries

Why Does Technology Advance in Cycles?

Long-run technological progress is cyclical because drastic innovations that introduce new technological opportunity are only profitable at times when repeated incremental innovation has nearly exhausted existing technological opportunity and driven entrepreneurial profit and income growth towards zero. The article presents a ’technological opportunity model’ where endogenous drastic and incremental innovations interact with exogenous discoveries in an idealized metric technology space. New ideas are created by convex combinations of existing ideas. Diminishing technological opportunity results in lower profits and growth, which then makes costly and risky drastic innovations profitable again. This relationship between intense drastic innovation intensity and poor levels of economic growth receives some empirical support.technology; growth; long waves; cycles; techno-logical paradigms; innovations