Edwards Clarification

WIth the benefit of follow-up reporting from Ezra Klein, John Edwards' plan to establish prizes for pharmaceutical research turns out to be less awesomely radical than it at first appeared:

This was muddled in their fact sheet and much of the initial reporting, but this program is not, in any way, a replacement for the current system of patents. It does not, in any way, change the way patents are awarded, or how long they last, or who can apply for them. Rather, it creates a separate and parallel track, a pilot program of sorts, wherein a committee would identify diseases and conditions that would benefit from alternative incentives for innovation, and offer prize money as the reward.

This revised plan is wildly less ambitious than it had appeared. What's not clear to me is whether companies who invent drugs under this "prize track" would need to forgo a patent in exchange for the prize. If not, this is a mildly useful way to encourage the development of drugs whose market potential isn't so hot (malaria treatment, say). If the answer is yes, by contrast, then this turns into a neat pilot program that, if successful, could come to supplant the current development model.

UPDATE: Factsheet (PDF) kind of buries the lede in my view (everyone's for this other stuff that comes before it in the document) but makes it clear that the answer is yes. There's also stuff in there about efforts to combat "everygreening" and other abusing patent practices. All in all, very strong, and readers know how I love intellectual property reform.

Photo by Flickr user Janet Calcaterra used under a Creative Commons license