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Following a bid to lower the cost of medicine,  the Philippine government has run into trouble with pharma manufacturer Pfizer.

IPWatch has an article to give you all the gory details.

There's a medication against high blood pressure. In the Philippines, it costs a lot; next door in Indonesia and Thailand, it's available a lot more cheaply.

Since the patent is due to expire next year, the Philippine government has ordered some 200 pills of the stuff, so its drug regulators can look at it. This way, the med should get the go-ahead as soon as the patent has run out.

Pfizer, the company holding the patent, has now sued the government of the Philippines for violation of international patent regulations - although the product in question has never even been near a market in the country.

This is probably a bid to gain a few more months of monopoly profits in the Philippines, when the patent has run out, but the regulators are still working on the approval. Pfizer must need the money to pay their CEO, who just got a substantial wage hike.

And for good measure, there are rumors that Pfizer used their advertising leverage to spin newspaper coverage of the issue.

Sorry for being silent for a week and a half. Vacation? I whish. In fact, I was working through the aftermath of the Yale A2K conference and preparing for my talk at GNU/Linuxtag on Saturday.

The good thing about travelling so much, though, is that sitting on airplanes with no power outlets in economy class gives you time to read. Last week, I actually sort of liked what I saw.

Two of the strongholds of economic liberalism ran extensive features on interesting subjects. The Economist carried a special report (login required) on "new media". This one quoted from a report by PriceWaterhouseCooper:

Successful media companies [...] will become “marketplaces that
let consumers search, research, share and configure their media
experiences.” To be good, these exchanges need to combine “a
personalised media experience with a social context for participation.”
Instead of “exclusive ownership of content or distribution assets” (the
stuff of old media), the media marketplaces will compete in their
“knowledge of consumer activity”, which they will use both to interact
more intimately with consumers and to match them better to advertising
that is unobtrusive and helpful (itself a novelty), and thus lucrative. 

It also has Terry Semel, Yahoo!'s boss (and former Time Warner fat cat) saying:

 “Until recently they were just being protective, keeping their arms
around their copyright,” says Mr Semel about the old industry that he
left behind. “The faster they start to pay attention to making stuff
for people like Yahoo!, the better for them.” They've been warned.

 And Forbes? They ran a feature about marketing in the pharmaceutical industry. The bottom line: If Big Pharma isn't doing well - and will be faring worse in the future - it's because they have hugely increased their marketing budget at the expense of research and development.

So don't believe a single word when they come around crying for stricter patent monopolies so that they can continue to innovate. We, the public, shouldn't keep paying the price for their deficient business strategies.