Tahir Amin started out wanting to play professional football in England. He found law instead, and specifically intellectual property law in the early 1990s, when the field was still new enough to feel cutting edge. After a decade of commercial IP practice in the UK and the US, he moved to India in 2004 to understand what the new global IP rules were doing to the people they never accounted for. He arrived just as India was being required to comply with WTO patent rules that would affect access to HIV medicines costing tens of thousands of dollars a year. That experience led him to co-found I-MAC in 2006.<\/p>\n
In this conversation, Tahir walks through the political economy of drug patents: how neoliberal policy from the late 1970s onward handed control of publicly funded research to private companies, how those companies built out sprawling patent portfolios to delay generic competition, and how the word \u201cinnovation\u201d became a shield against any real scrutiny. He also talks about what I-MAC\u2019s work has achieved, the blowback it has faced, and why he considers himself a \u201ccynical optimist\u201d who believes the long game is the only game worth playing.<\/p>\n
The post Medicine\u2019s Monopoly Problem<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tahir Amin started out wanting to play professional football in England. He found law instead, and specifically intellectual property law in the early 1990s, when the field was still new enough to feel cutting edge. After a decade of commercial IP practice in the UK and the US, he moved to India in 2004 to understand what the new global IP rules were doing to the people they never accounted for. He arrived just as India was being required to comply with WTO patent rules that would affect access to HIV medicines costing tens of thousands of dollars a year. That experience led him to co-found I-MAC in 2006.<\/p>\n In this conversation, Tahir walks through the political economy of drug patents: how neoliberal policy from the late 1970s onward handed control of publicly funded research to private companies, how those companies built out sprawling patent portfolios to delay generic competition, and how the word \u201cinnovation\u201d became a shield against any real scrutiny. He also talks about what I-MAC\u2019s work has achieved, the blowback it has faced, and why he considers himself a \u201ccynical optimist\u201d who believes the long game is the only game worth playing.<\/p>\n The post Medicine\u2019s Monopoly Problem<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tahir Amin started out wanting to play professional football in England. He found law instead, and specifically intellectual property law in the early 1990s, when the field was still new enough to feel cutting edge. After a decade of commercial IP practice in the UK and the US, he moved to India in 2004 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n