As reported by copyright lawyer William Patry in a comment on his blog:

"... I would like to ... point[] to an amazing new UK historical resource. ... the project in the UK House of Commons to digitize (or as they say digitise) Hansard, the official record of the House of Commons, for the period 1803 to 2005. I have already used it and found great discussions of copyright issues, including the term of protection, as early as 1803.

And this just in: asthmatics everywhere are being forced to pay quadruple for their inhalers starting in 2009, by a nifty little bit of collusion among Big Pharma companies and Big Government. And they've neatly set it up so that the environmental movement gets the blame.

There are cheap generic asthma inhalers, but they use a CFC propellant. The amount of ozone-depleting CFCs produced by their use is minuscule, vastly smaller than many other sources of CFC pollution still out there, but the US Government, supposedly at the behest of the environmental movement, has seen fit to legislate their banning at the end of this year.

Of course, it just so happens that the only inhalers on the market that don't use a CFC as a propellant are all in the $40-plus range and are expensive, brand name ones rather than generic ones.

To figure out what's really going on, of course, one should as always follow the money, and in this case it leads to three pharmaceutical giants with a patent portfolio.

Not on the medicine used in those inhalers, which has long since gone generic, but only the only known non-CFC propellants that will work properly with that medicine.

Lobbying the government to ban the CFCs in asthma inhalers therefore results in a sneaky, de-facto requirement that asthmatics not use generics, and a way to get an end run around the patent on the medicine itself having expired.

The "right" thing for the government to do, in the interests of the environment AND public health, is of course to ban the CFC-using inhalers but also to buy out the key patent in that patent portfolio (they can do this -- assert eminent domain and pay the companies the market value of the patent itself) and put one of the alternative propellants into the public domain.

But of course they won't do that, because their real motive is to please one of their big sources of campaign contributions, Big Pharma.

Meanwhile, asthmatics in the lower income brackets get to wheeze and, perhaps, die on the altar of the profit gods and, of course, intellectual monopoly.

Details can be found in this month's Scientific American, although it does not mention the likelihood that the true motive for all of this stuff is greed rather than (perhaps misguided, but genuine) environmentalism.

Patent-wielding Big Pharma stepping on the poor, and this time killing people right here in the West, rather than poor HIV-infected victims in Africa! This might be a good one to use to push hard for copyright and patent abolition as contrary to humanitarian purposes as well as contrary to basic liberty and property rights.

"This might be a good one to use to push hard for copyright and patent abolition as contrary to humanitarian purposes as well as contrary to basic liberty and property rights."

That should be

This might be a good one to use to push hard for copyright and patent abolition as it proves that "IP rights" are contrary to humanitarian purposes as well as contrary to basic liberty and property rights.

I wonder who altered my comment to make it unclear? Lonnie by any chance?

None of your business:

Re altering your comment: I would not if I knew how, and I do not know how.

I was unaware of what you discussed in your first post. Do you have a link for that? Incidentally, that also sucks. I was thrilled that some of the most effective inhalers on the market were based on expired patents. Obviously, someone figured out a clever way to put them back on the expensive list. Perhaps it is time to lobby congress to get an exemption for inhalers regarding the CFC requirement. I agree with you that the amount of CFC's in inhalers was miniscule.