Um…I can see how you’d interpret that, but what I meant, anyways, is that getting the rights to first generic (it involves the FDA and it’s actually not something I have specific knowledge about) is pretty cut-throat, and in that sense, it is competitive. There are ongoing court cases regarding which company will have the right to release a generic of a product still under patent, etc. The generic companies are competing against each other to get their products out, but because they aren’t going to market things the way Big Pharma will, they have to rely on their skill and speed in creating the generic, showing stability, showing bioequivalence and getting all the paperwork filed first and correctly, and then being able to reliably supply their clients well enough that the clients will stick by them for their next release, and all at a cost that the other generics companies can’t beat by any significant amount.
I call that competition. It’s just happening away from the store shelves.
Competitive, as I righteously see it, doesn’t mean “cut-throat.” It means a transparent market with low barriers to entry. So a market with brand loyalty and consumers who have no intention of changing suppliers is, by my definition, NOT competitive. A truly ‘competitive’ market has many benefits, including lower prices, lower costs, and higher quality. A market that is merely ‘cut throat’ does not.
I really wish people understood this true meaning of “competitive,” including ones who are involved with studying economics and making regulation. All too often they make the same mistake as you, equating the word with “cut throat” and then not inventing another word to convey the extremely important economic concept. (Seriously… this is an issue that affects public discourse and policy.)
I’m sorry, I am not an economist. What word should I have invented or used to describe how generic pharmaceutical companies compete against one another to sell their products? I think my meaning was still clear, even if I wasn’t correct in my technical terminology.
Sorry, I was just venting my pet-peeve. But you could say ‘cut throat.’ That describes it pretty well.
Competitive would, basically, mean that the generic drugs are cheap, priced almost as low as the cost of making them. Given the brand loyalty that you talked about, I would imagine that’s not how things are.
[…] So a market with brand loyalty and consumers who have no intention of changing suppliers is, by my definition, NOT competitive. A truly ‘competitive’ market has many benefits, including lower prices, lower costs, and higher quality. […]QUOTE]
I like this sentiment and hope a slight hijack will be forgiven: I’m newly aware of a problem with truly competitive markets of your description. There are so many products entering and leaving the marketplace that many of them don’t last long enough to get repeat business. I guess this is a kind of opposite to brand loyalty - the products disappear so fast that you can never give return business to the makers of superior ones, and you can’t buy up a stock of any product because you don’t know from past experience whether its quality is good. What say you?
Hmm… One of the things that makes Oreos taste so good (compared to other sandwich cookies) is that they slightly burn the cookies. I don’t know if that got a patent or not, but could it have? At the time, it probably was fairly nonintuitive to overcook chocolate cookies, and blind taste tests where people preferred burnt cookies to non-burnt ones could probably be used to argue “usefulness”.
Another reason for preferring trade secrets is to do with the “lost in other ways” bit that you mentioned. If someone infringes your patent you must defend it. This can mean massive legal expenses. If you don’t defend it, you can lose it.
Let’s say I invent a new widget and obtain a patent over it. The patent tells my competitors the useful, non-obvious and novel aspects of the widget. A sweat-shop in China takes the patent and makes knock-offs of my widgets, selling them much cheaper than I can. I must sue them to defend the patent. Many legal fees later the Chinese company shuts down and I don’t recover any of my fees. A month later another Chinese company suddenly appears selling knock-offs of my widgets. Rinse and repeat.
It can be a hard lesson for inventors to realize that while patents offer legal protection, they do not offer legal enforcement. The patent owner needs to pay for that, and hope s/he can recover the costs later.
That’s exactly what I was talking about. If you are going to defend it in court, you’d better pray it was written well in the first place. Like Stranger said, they sometimes like to make the patents general. But if the patent is too general, it might be declared invalid for covering prior art. It’s extremely important to have a patent attorny with a detailed knowledge of the subject.
Of course it does, in the channel at least. If you have 10,000 retail stores, you will buy, and continue to buy, form the first seller most likely. Because its generic
why would they understand that as the meaning - that if someone is successful, there has been, and there is, no competition? that is not how markets work. Establishing barriers to entry is fine - that is what the patent is, and there are other ways to do it, and there are ways to compete around it.
I think this is incorrect. You can’t lose your patent if you let someone else practice it without permission. It’s totally up to you what to do with your patent rights. It’s not like trademarks.
