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Apple Watches with blood oxygen tech are banned again
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I feel like this kinda tech should be more widely available if it's for health reasons, to avoid a monopoly on something vital.
Patents literally are a government granted time-limited monopoly. There are a number of reasons why the government grants these monopolies. Perhaps, the ethics of medical patents should be debated, but if we collectively don't grant patents on vital medical technologies, then I think it is unlikely that corporations are going to invest billions developing and testing life saving drugs. (Another debate: are private corporations the best stewards of developing this technology.)
For now, this is the system we've engineered ourselves into a corner with.
I don't really care about some blood oxygen monitor in a smart watch, but inadvertently destroying the pharmaceutical industry over it probably ought to be carefully considered.
"It's not enough that a company has a working product and a captive audience (sick people in need) but we need to ensure they're the only ones that are able to bend these sick people over to profit off it."
Yeah you're right, it is as dumb as it sounds.
You spent 2 billion dollars developing a cure for x? I reverse engineered your cure for $30k (or just looked up your formula in your regulatory filings for free), so I can sell the same product for much cheaper than you since I don't have any development costs to recoup. If you can't protect your investment, you won't make the investment.
The problem here is not the patent system. The problem is relying on private for-profit industry to develop drugs. Not enough people get your ailment for a cure to be profitable? Sorry, you are SOL. Also, the current system incentivises developing maintenance drugs over cures. That's one of the big reasons Type 2 diabetes has met metformin, janumet, glipizide, farxiga, ozempic, etc. All of those drugs are symptom management rather than treatments. A treatment would be a financial disaster for big pharma.