Reply #9: I'm sure Nutriset would be happy with the royalty, [View All]

but the kids who die because they don't get the formula because the price with the Nutriset royalty built-in will be too high for the aid organizations to afford all they need will still be dead, just as if Nutriset had remained the lone producer. When you say "force Nutriset to license and pay Nutriset a royalty" you are saying a certain number of kids will starve to death to protect the sanctity of patents. That's unacceptable. Set aside the lofty legalese of "patent law" and look closely at the material in dispute here. We're talking about a fucking kitchen recipe of peanut butter, powdered milk, ground up vitamins, and preservatives.

Although I feel tugged by the conflicting claims, for example experiencing a feeling of gratitude to Nutriset for initially developing a formula which larger producers could have developed long ago, and feeling hope that larger producers will provide more of it more cheaply -while being simultaneously aware their own motives haven't suddenly become noble now that they want to produce peanut formula- I absolutely refuse to become morally invested in a dispute between what is, in the last analysis, nothing more than two companies out to make a buck off of famine. Nutriset isn't doing this for anyone's "thanks" now, whatever the impulse was that first led them to develop the formula. The American agribusiness conglomerates aren't doing anything in this case out of the goodness of their hearts, either. I kick their competing claims against each other and any feelings I have about them into the trash. The only claim that matters is the human need for the widest possible availability/lowest cost of peanut formula, in order to alleviate as much suffering and death as possible.

In a similar way, I applaud the Africa based pharmaceutical companies which for years "pirated" the formula for patented drugs used in HIV/AIDS treatment. They "license" the patents now, at zero royalties cost. But they only have that zero-royalties deal because they were initially willing to tell the Western pharmaceuticals to go to hell with their patents. The "licensing" arrangement is merely a face saving measure for western corporations, so they can maintain the illusion that the whole world shares their obscene values which put the sanctity of patents over human life.