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World AIDS day this article on the high prices for AIDS drugs caught my eye. I’m not sure though. Generics cost less because those companies don’t spend much money at all on basic research, clinical trials, product education, etc. So to compare their prices with those charged by the big pharma companies isn’t exactly fair.

It can cost a company billions of dollars to bring any drug to market – whether it’s an AIDS drug or some other therapeutic agent. And generics companies don’t do any of that work – or very little. Maybe governments should be underwriting the drug costs?

This new Napster

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-Bertelsmann (BMG) deal is pretty cool, and if it’s a blanket deal including “immunity” for songs already being served up by Napster users then I think it stands a good chance of success. I would definitely pay $60 for the ability to continue to use Napster in a relatively unfettered way. Essentially, under this plan Napster becomes a personal copyright clearinghouse, serving consumers as ASCAP or SOCAN serve radio stations and others who present music commercially.

The problem, though, is the same as when a newspaper I used to freelance for decided it wanted to put its content online. The problem was they hadn’t bought that right from me – they’d only bought the right to first publication. I would have been more than happy to allow them to put it online as well, or in a CD-ROM archive – but my price for such usage is different in that case – and they weren’t interested in paying me that rate, they wanted the same rate. So the question that remains to me is – are the artists going to be paid by Bertelsmann for this? Or is it just added to their deals for no additional consideration?

People seem pretty

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outraged about this story from Wired News: Online Prices Not Created Equal. If only such outrage were brought to pricing issues in the offline world. For years poverty activists have decried grocery stores’ pricing practices – for instance charging higher prices in poor neighbourhoods than in wealthy ones for groceries. Different people have always received different prices, depending on the store. Amazon is just bringing an old practice to a new world. I can’t get that worked up about it.

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