Reach for Infinity

TRADEMARK BUGS: A LEGAL HISTORY



Adam Roberts


THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION document has been produced by a working group comprising academics from the UK’s Royal Psychological and Somatic Law Institute (Birmingham) and the Russian Federation’s Academic Law University (Академический правовой университет, АПУ). It aims to summarise the legal position with respect to so-called ‘Trademark Bugs’, and is not intended to have the force of a policy proposal or political statement. The management board of the АПУ in particular wish to distance themselves from the conclusion in section 5. For more discussion on these matters see Kokoschka et al 2099.


The Three ‘Porter Rules’


THE FIRST COURT CASE directly relevant was filed under UK legislation, not because the first Trademark Bugs were developed or distributed in that country, but because the UK’s unilateral renegotiation of their national relationship to the ‘Madrid System’ (which was in turn part of their withdrawal from EU copyright jurisdictions) created a more favourable balance of proof for INTA, USPTO or WIPO prosecution. Protocols governing the dissemination of these new products meant that the bugs were not at first distributed in areas that had suffered calamitous natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, plague) in the previous five years, although this was later reduced to 12 months and subsequently – as of 2031 – abandoned altogether. As a consequence of this, Porter-addend.2031d clarifies the extent to which the original Rules must be considered consonant with international law.


PORTER’S ORIGINAL RULING laid down the so-called three ‘Porter Rules’ for Trademark Bugs. These are:

? That the pathology itself must not be ‘excessively physically distressing’ or entail any long-term hazard to health, wellbeing or longevity. These latter terms, of course, have proved hard to define precisely as salients under legal challenge.

? That the pathology itself must be no more virulent than the baseline virus or bacterium, prior to any genetic adaptation. This applies the legal principle, common from other aspects of EU Genetics Law, of balanced hazard equilibrium.


? That the pathology itself must be preventable by some means (later modified to ‘at least one mean’) not trademarked to the distributing company. The meaning of preventable in this context has generated a great deal of discussion, with legal authorities divided between interpreting this so-called ‘Third Porter Rule’ either (a) strictly, in terms of legal consent – briefly, that plaintiffs need only show that they did not knowingly and competently opt-in to the relevant pathology; or (b) broadly, in terms of reasonable precaution – the argument advanced by Goober, Thwaite and Associates, known popularly as the ‘soap and water’ test. This latter holds that, as with the common cold, everyday precautions such as washing one’s hands with soap and water should be enough to avoid infection, for it to come within the meaning of the act. Accordingly people who, compos mentis and of legal majority, elect not to take such commonsense precautions have ipso facto given consent to being infected by Trademark Bugs. The rulings of Ito (Ito-2025c) and Carallan (Carallan-2024d-2025a) confirmed the ‘broad’ definition to have legal grounding. Since 2034 this has only been challenged in court once (Boothby-2037b-d), a case which eventually tested the legal status of all three of the Porter Rules. The ‘broad’ interpretation of Rule 3 was eventually upheld.


SEVERAL EARLY LEGAL challenges stalled because the plaintiffs exhausted their funding. It is worth noting this fact because there is a widely held though erroneous belief that the case of Lukacs vs. Glaxco (Reinhart-2029a-d) established any legal precedent. Passages from the speeches delivered in court by Milo Lukacs have passed into popular currency as if they had legal basis; although in fact the case was later suspended for nondisbursement of legal stipends and no judgment was arrived at.

Let us not lose sight of the key issue: corporations are not only manufacturing genetically tweaked versions of the common cold, they are releasing them into the environment via multiple vectors. We have not yet been able to prove in court that such releasing itself constitutes corporate delinquency, but we do know this: polls have consistently shown that the general public thinks of these actions in exactly those terms – as delinquency, quasi-criminal activity and worse. People are getting sick with genetically tagged flu viruses for which the only cure is manufactured by these same corporations! People are being forced into the position where they have to purchase medication, manufactured by the same corporations that made them sick, in order to bring them back to the baseline position of health. This practice is profoundly inhumane, unethical, and monopolistic. This practice is wicked.


LUKACS ALSO PUT before the court various financial estimates that have been contested. He claimed that over the tax-year ’28-’29, the three biggest pharmaceutical companies made €875 billion profit on Trademark Bugs alone; and that over the previous five years the profit from Trademark Bugs was double that of all other pharmaceutical sales combined. These claims were themselves the cause of two legal challenges: one on the grounds of their inaccuracy (it was argued in court that the €875 billion figure was gross, not net; although a countersuit [Abnett-2030a] sought to show that, when EU tax-incentives for medical research and charitable donations were included, the tax rate on this profit was zero) and on the grounds that disclosure of profits violated the corporations’ legal rights (legally functional as ‘individuals’) to privacy. This was upheld by Rinn-2031b, but without retrospective force. Accordingly all sums cited for post-’31 profits, including ones included in this paper, are estimates (legally permitted under the Corporate Oversight Act of 2035) and in no way intended to intrude upon the privacy of corporations qua individuals.


BALANCE REQUIRES US to quote from the chief legal representative for Glaxco, Magrat Helmansdottir KC, who said:

The soap-and-water test is no mere legal fiction, but an actual, measurable social good. Drugs have their part to play in humankind’s perennial war against illness, but it is a small part compared to the role played by simple hygiene. Hygiene has saved more lives than all the drugs ever produced. The distribution of Trademark Bugs (free at point of issue, I might add) is an actual, measurable and positive incitement to people to live more hygienic lives. Glaxco themselves sell one-cent bars of proprietary soap through all the major supermarkets; and expend considerable sums advertising the need to wash hands every hour and avoid spreading infections – all such transmissible infections, not merely those bugs Trademarked to Glaxco. Furthermore, Glaxco has invested €1.1 billion in the science of Epidemiology, including endowing the Glaxco Chair in Epidemiological Science at Harvard, and funding forty annual PhD scholarships in the discipline. It is no exaggeration to say that this investment is the single most significant investment in this science ever made. What the prosecution are calling for would devastate the advances made in medical science and materially diminish human wellbeing. Quite apart from our moral duty to uphold the laws protecting the sanctity of commercial free enterprise and encouraging self-reliance and independence in consumers – quite apart from that, what the prosecution proposes would have a measurably negative impact upon world health.


OUTSIDE THE COURTROOM, during media interviews, Helmansdottir added: ‘I appreciate it sounds counter-intuitive; I understand that many people feel that these corporations are deliberately infecting them with designer germs in order to increase their profits by selling them the cures – but the facts are the facts. None of that is true. Trademark Bugs have made the world cleaner and healthier. We can’t afford to undo the advances we have made.’ She later – successfully – resisted a prosecution petition that this speech be entered into evidence, arguing that the clause ‘these corporations are deliberately infecting them with designer germs in order to sell them the cures’, abstracted from context, would be prejudicial to the legal process.


FOLLOWING THE COLLAPSE of Lukacs vs. Glaxco (Reinhart2029a-d), 47 private prosecutions were brought against various corporations by individuals who claimed they had caught Trademarked diseases and suffered, in one way or another, in excess of the discomfort permitted by the Porter Rules. All but one were conducted under the no-win-no-fee remit. Of these 5 were abandoned, 3 went to court (the plaintiffs losing in each case) and 39 were settled out of court. The next legal milestone was Glaxco vs The Guardian (Gesswyn 2033a), when the company successfully sued the UK-based media conglomerate for repeating claims that eleven distinct strains of Trademark Bug were ‘monopolistic’.


THE EDITOR AT the time, Jean Ebner, conceded that this defeat ‘stung and enraged’ her senior staff. After a popular campaign and fundraising effort (‘Goldenbugs’) the Guardian took Glaxco to court under US legal jurisdiction (presiding justice Natch Greys, Guardian Corps v. Glaxco, 676 F.3d 854, 862 (9th Cir 2036); [EU citation format: Greyes-2036c-2039a]). The grounds of the suit were ingenious: a Guardian reporter, Po Lok Tam, deliberately contracted one of Glaxco’s most widely disseminated Trademark Bugs, a common-cold tweak called ‘Sapphire Sniffles’, the cure for which – ‘Azure 7’ (available as pill, or nanoneedle diffuser) – was amongst the cheapest in the Glaxco range. The symbolic significance of the ‘four-shots-a-dollar’ cure was part of the intended effect. Po Lok Tam refused to buy the cure and suffered the symptoms of the bug: raised temperature, headache, runny nose and sore throat, advertised as ‘lasting depending on the state of the sufferer’s immune system between three and eight weeks’. There were, she claimed, other symptoms; but only the ones specified in the Glaxco promotional material were entered into evidence without dispute from either side. The force of the Guardian suit was that the sore throat, by impairing the ability of the plaintiff to speak, illegally restricted her first amendment rights to free speech under the US constitution.



Guardian v. Glaxco (2036-39): a summary


INITIAL REPORTS OF this trial expressed the opinion that it would soon be thrown out of court: none of the symptoms breached Porter Rules, and neither side denied that Ms Po could still express herself in writing – in previous cases concerning the right to freedom of speech (see Grohmann, 2088 for a summary of this legal history) this had been deemed sufficient to satisfy the constitutional requirement. In fact, Guardian v. Glaxco became one of the longest, most fiercely fought and expensive cases in the history of Trademark Bug law. We can only provide the merest sketch of the arguments and counter-arguments, here (Malahat 2090 has a more detailed account). The main theses and antitheses can be summarised as follows:

? A first move by Glaxco to dismiss the case as lacking prima facie validity (the plaintiff having unimpeded access to text-based modes, including an artificial voice app on her phone, was able fully to actualise her first-amendment rights, irrespective of her sore throat). Motion was denied.

? A move to early resolution by the plaintiff on the grounds that Ms Po gave no explicit consent to losing her voice. Denied, after the Glaxco team satisfied the court that Ms Po had, intentionally, gone out of her way to catch the bug.

? Glaxco legal team attempted to prove that, since many other Trademark Bugs produced symptoms that left the throat and voice unaffected – and since the plaintiff could have elected to catch any of these – she had no legal right to complain about loss of voice following a Bug she specifically elected to catch.

? Over several months, the Guardian team attempted to persuade the court that Trademark Bugs diminished or denied not only first amendment rights, but basic constitutional rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Since Ms Po’s life was not in danger, the legal debate concentrated on the criteria of ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’. The Guardian attempted to bring before the court testimony of hundreds of sufferers of common colds who had, by their own admission, been left ‘housebound’, hoping to show that this impaired their liberty. They also argued that being ill contravened the right to happiness, on the grounds that being ill makes people unhappy. Glaxco counter-argued that being ill did not prevent an individual from pursuing happiness, if they so chose; and that it was this latter right that was constitutionally guaranteed. Justice Greyes concurred.

? One woman (Paula de Chirico, from Waco, TX) gave evidence for sixty days, after Justice Greyes admitted her evidence. Having caught a Glaxco bug called ‘Nosy Rudolf’ she had ordered the cure ($9.95 for three tablets) online, but delivery was held up by a postal strike. She had gone to work mildly ill, and had inadvertently sneezed on her boss, who had thus also caught the bug. The boss had fired Ms de Chirico. The Guardian sought to argue that this demonstrated that Glaxco Trademark Bugs had interfered with Ms de Chirico’s constitutional rights. The court debated for several weeks on the admissibility of a completely different Trademark Bug; the relevance of an individual other than the plaintiff; and the relative liability of the postal company. Eventually Justice Greves ruled that the burden of liability rested with de Chirico, for not maintaining hygienic practice with respect to her own contagion or spreading her contagion to others.

? Following this, many of the plaintiff’s claims were rolled back. Glaxco again moved the case be dismissed.

? The Guardian pressed the freedom of speech angle. At the heart of this was their claim that for eight days in the first instance, and for a later 12-hour period, Ms Po had been denied her right to free expression by Glaxco’s bug. The Glaxco team brought in expert witnesses to show that Ms Po had received far greater media exposure during those three days than at any other time in her career.

? There was a long discussion as to whether ‘media exposure’ amounts to ‘freedom of speech’. Dozens of expert witnesses were called by both sides. This debate was eventually parked by Justice Greves, as ingermane and vexatious.

? The final months of the case were characterised by a series of increasingly complex blocking motions by the Guardian. Eventually Justice Greve guillotined further blocking, and ruled in favour of Glaxco. In his summing up, he declared: ‘there may yet be a legal challenge that could be mounted on the grounds that Trademark Bugs violate a citizen’s first amendment rights; but such a challenge will need to take as its plaintiff somebody other than a professional journalist mounting a clear and exploitative publicity stunt’.

? Seven different appeals followed, on grounds both of the due process and the Justice’s final summing up. Two of these were unresolved or abandoned for financial reasons. Five upheld the judgment.

‘This is a bad day for democracy,’ Jean Ebner declared from the courthouse steps. ‘The judge has said, in effect, that people who work for the media cannot challenge these wicked corporations, and their terrible diseases, because they work for the media! He has left open the possibility that so-called “ordinary citizens” could mount a legal challenge, but how will they ever be able to afford it?’


‘WITHOUT THE SUPPORT of the Guardian and the public fundraising campaign,’ Ms Po added, ‘I would never have been able to bring my case. This judgment puts corporate profit above the needs of common human decency.’ It was not obvious at the time (although posterity has made clear) that this court case was the last serious legal challenge to the marketing of Trademark Bugs. The Guardian Conglomeration never recovered from the expense of mounting and then losing the suit, and ceased trading two years later.


THROUGHOUT THE EARLY 2040s there were several attempts to raise the funding necessary to challenge the big Trademark Bug manufacturers in courts; but none of these progressed beyond initial stages. The ‘big three’ pharma companies – PfizerNovartis, Glaxco and Bayer – expanded operations. Bayer developed anti-addiction medication, which it sold alongside its own-brand tobacco, stimulant and euphoric products. PN developed respirant illnesses that spread what it called ‘onequarter-asthma’ (this label has been several times challenged in court as deliberately misrepresenting the degree of respiratory distress experienced by sufferers) alongside several models of ‘fashion accessory inhalers’. The marketing of these to children resulted in a fad for carrying the devices, often expensively personalised, across much of Europe, South America and East Asia during the later 2040s.


Change in generational attitudes


EVIDENCE THAT YOUNGER generations had a different attitude to Trademark Bugs than their parents and grandparents has been gathered by Rakesh Bandari (Bandari 2089).

For people growing up in the ’40s and ’50s most of the diseases that had afflicted humanity for millennia had been cured. Nobody expected those cures to be distributed free. Moreover, the sense that ‘disease’ in the abstract still had a place in the ontological ecosystem of human life was deeprooted, and many young people found it easy to accept that the Big Three pharma companies filled a niche that would otherwise be supplied by unpredictable feral viruses and bacteria. The situation was helped by canny PR by all three: PN and Glaxco by 2053 (and Bayer by 2055) guaranteed student loans at 1% under the bank rate to all university students. A mass-market campaign established them as ‘cool’ with younger demographics. Sports events, game and music products and TV – all of it was heavily subsidised by pharma money. Advertising presented the Trademark Bugs as a way of unofficially ‘taxing’ those too old and foolish to follow simple hygiene regimens, syphoning their money for the benefit of the young. That the young (especially the very young) were disproportionately affected by Trademark Bugs did not adversely affect this impression. By 2055 pharma companies overtook munitions companies as the largest donors to political parties; and after the ’58 reforms they donated huge sums to legal infrastructure too. By 2060 few could deny that the industry as a whole, and the Big Three in particular, represented the most politically powerful group on the planet.



THIS CAN BE illustrated by Glaxco’s development of ‘Faceshapers’, bugs that cause non-metastasising tumours to grow on various areas of the upper body and skull. The drugs necessary to reverse these growths were not cheap; and some people (especially in the climate-change affected equatorial areas) were compelled to live with the deformities. But many young people in the affluent west actively embraced this Bug, going so far as arranging Trademark Bug Swap Parties. The aim was to alter the body in ways deemed ‘cool’. Particularly valued were horns of bone growing under the skin on shoulders and collar-bone, or socalled ‘Klingon’ or ‘Publikumsbeschimpfung’ growths on the forehead and cheeks.


LEGAL CHALLENGES WERE sometimes mounted against the new strains of bug, but without success. The big court cases of the ’60s went, as it were, the other way: in particular PN v. Raj Choudhury (Schwarz-Gardos 2065c). Choudhury had made a personal fortune in IT, and set up a company that bought medication from Glaxco, PN and Bayer in bulk, and then distributed it free at clinics in the Third World. PN agreed to Glaxco and Bayer to take on the task of challenging this in court, as restraint of trade and violation of the terms of sale. The case lasted three weeks, in which Choudury’s main defence – humanitarianism – was legally demolished. Choudhury was fined, and imprisoned after refusing to pay. His assets were seized and distributed to the plaintiff.


THROUGH THE EARLY ’70s the Big Three confined their new products to cosmetic and minor afflictions. Bayer had a hit in ’74 with their Kahlkopf product. Male-pattern baldness having been cured in the ’40s, the effect of this Bug – it affected both men and women with rapid-onset alopecia – was extraordinary. Sales of the cure pushed Bayer into the top position, profit-wise. Bayer were also the first of the Big Three to break the €10 trillion annual profit barrier (PN currently hold the all-time record, with their one-year profit of €74 trillion, although these figures do not include monies made that are tax-deductible under charitable, educational and defence budgets) [Figures estimated under academic ‘fair use’ rules].


Tax consequences of Big Three success


BIG THREE ANNUAL profits began outstripping the GDPs of even the world’s largest countries in the early ’60s. By the ’80s it was clear that these commercial organisations were, simply, doing a better job of ‘titheing’ the population than nation-states had previously managed with old-fashioned tax collection paradigms. The use of the term ‘tithe’ was forwarded by the various financial restructuring proposals of ’83, and challenged in court. The Russian Federation fought the longest legal battle on this (see Brohstein 2090 for a detailed account), but by the middle of the decade the only countries that retained a ‘traditional’ old-style tax regimen were few and small-scale. The bigger countries all passed over to systems where income tax and sales taxes were reduced to between 2% and 5% – and in some cases abolished altogether (less than 2% did not provide enough income to cover the expense of gathering the tax). Where previous generations had worked and then paid tax on work income, the new generations quickly adapted to receiving their salaries effectively tax-free, but paying money instead to maintain baseline levels of health and productivity.


THE BALANCE WAS simple: (a) pay the Big Three for the so-called Omnipills, that protected against all the traditional Trademark Bugs – as an expense, this averaged 17% of average income in most countries, although (being price rather than indexdetermined) it was flat-rate, benefitting the wealthy at the relative expense of the poor. Or (b) elect not to buy health, and attempt to work through whatever illnesses ensued. The ‘soapand-water’ test was tested in court in 2086, when it was claimed that the Bayer Bug ‘Emerald Rash’ survived soap. The outcome (Kawasaki-86d) was that ‘soap’ was taken, legally, to include a variety of proprietary antibacterial washes and wipes. ‘It is clear,’ writes Bandari, ‘that this would not have been accepted by the courts of the ’30s and ’40s. But public attitudes to the role of Trademark Bugs in society had shifted’ (Bandari 2089).


THE BIG THREE funded national programmes of education, policing and crime; and sponsored infrastructure programmes. Many countries retained ‘traditional’ tax only in order to fund their military, although EU, South American and East Asian nations were happy to have the Pharma companies supply defence needs as well. Faced with an impending legal challenge on the ‘no taxation without representation’ principle, Bayer and Glaxco created a second variety of publically tradable share – giving the owner the right to vote on public policy, but not commercial or proprietary, matters. By 2090 PN followed suit, and by the century’s end – at time of writing – democracy has adapted to the new model across much of the globe. ‘Voting’ is now something a citizen does if they opt-in to the political process by buying voting shares. If s/he chooses not to do so they are deemed, legally, to have surrendered their democratic rights.


Legal Implications of Combat


IT IS HARD to assess the long-term impact of the financial success of Trademark Bugs, and is beyond the scope of the present paper. The purpose of this final section is to consider the potential consequences of on-going litigation pertaining to the Bangladeshi Conflict. The high casualty figures of this conflict, as much as the central role played by pharma companies, render it a test-case for the on-going development of Trademark Bugs in the future of international relations. What is clear is that conflict represents a significant legal test-case for what amounts to a radically revisioned basis for civic and legal management of Trademark Bugs, up to and including a complete restatement of the Porter Rules for their commercial exploitation.


DESPITE BEING OFFICIALLY termed the ‘Bangladeshi War’, the conflict has spread across a much larger area than the Bay of Bengal. At the same time it is also true that the Battle for the port of Cha??agrama – in Bangladesh – has been one of the biggest of the war so far. The whole region has suffered much more markedly from climate change than other areas on the globe, and economic growth of an averagely consistent 3% per 5 years has been diluted by outstripping population increases. The whole area shares with central Mexico the distinction of the world’s highest rates of untreated Trademark Bug infections. At the same time, the Big Three have directed in excess of €5 billion humanitarian aid, including €220 million worth of free antiseptic soap, dispersed in the area since 2091.


THE MAIN ANTAGONISTS in the war (despite the use of nationstate shell identities) are generally agreed as being Bayer on the one hand, and on the other an alliance of smaller, ambitious and emergent pharmaceutical companies, led by the Myanmar Pharmaceutical Manufacturers union   (MPMU). The latter brought together troops from Myanmar, Malaysia and India; the former deployed armies from Russian Federation and EU states. The specific flashpoints – control of the lucrative industrial centres positioned along the Karnaphuli River – are less relevant to our present discussion than the way the war has been prosecuted.

A rapid conventional phase shifted suddenly in June 2098 with the release of weaponised pharma. The poisoning of the Ganges aside (not a matter of strictly legal relevance) this led to two large-scale lawsuits. One was lodged by the MPMU Alliance in the EU Supreme Court, arguing that Bayer’s pharmaceutical ordnance, deployed to cause harm and death to opposing troops, was in clear breach of the Porter Rules. Bayer’s legal defence team counter-argued that the Porter Rules were never intended to apply to a warzone. The court was told that Bayer did indeed hold reserves of meds to cure such soldiers who had not already died, and that they were prepared to release these when a peace treaty was signed.



THE MPMU TACITLY conceded this suit by releasing its own weaponised pharma. Bayer filed a countersuit against the MPMU conventional weapons, on the grounds that the companies held no ‘antidote’ materiel to counter the effects of bullets and shrapnel. In peacetime this suit would almost certainly have been dismissed as vexatious litigation, but under the extraordinary circumstances it was allowed to proceed. It was, in fact, accepted by many as an attempt to reconfigure the nature of war along more humanitarian lines (‘our aim is legally restraining more destructive conventional weaponry in favour of less destructive pharmaceutical weaponry’, was the official Bayer court statement). This suit is on-going. Recently, Bayer has undertaken pre-emptive strikes against the factories of the MPMU, following intelligence reports that they were working on trademark-infringing cures for the weapons of the Bayer forces. ‘Killing and maiming is one thing,’ said Bayer vicechairman Hester Lu. ‘Wars have entailed that for thousands of years. But violating commercial copyrights and trademarks is quite another, and such behaviour will not be tolerated, in peace or in war’. Retaliation has brought long-range missile strikes to the European base of Bayer manufacture, and threatens to spread the conflict further.


IT IS POSSIBLE that further pharma conflicts will develop around the world. As such, it is necessary to establish legal protocols that go beyond the Geneva Convention in order to structure and horizon belligerence. At this point the joint-working team on the present paper have failed to find unanimity, and instead have agreed to position two alternate concluding paragraphs. For legal reasons, these are personalised with the names of teamleaders, although the sentiments they express were collectively agreed by the team-leaders’ respective teams.


Conclusion 1:

Rachel Statton-Cummings, RPSL : The financial power and influence of the income associated with Trademark Bugs has resulted in seismic changes in the political and therefore social structures of our world. Democracy has, broadly, shifted from a flat-rate one-person-one-vote model to a corporate, buy-as-many-votes-as-you-like model. Democratic engagement is still open, at least for those who can afford to buy votes, but there is no guarantee it will stay this way (US and EU sets a maximum price for voting shares at $5/€3 each; but legislation currently being debated will remove maxima and allow the market to determine rates). Freedom of speech, once a necessary plank of democracy, has been reoriented around the axis of copyright and trademark law. Above all, what could have been the greatest single step towards collective human wellbeing in the world’s history – the development of effective treatments for almost all cancers, all bacterial fevers, all GTI and skin diseases, all influenzas and even the myriad forms of the common cold – has instead been diverted into the artificial maintaining of these diseases in the general population solely to generate profits for three large and fifty-five smaller pharma companies. Trademark bugs go routinely untreated in poorer countries, causing unnecessary distress – and, since the leakage of weaponised pharma from the Asian War, often provoke long-term harm and even death. This whole situation can only be described as a collective moral wrong on a massive scale; and the international Law needs to be mobilised to address its consequences.


Conclusion 2:

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Golumbovsy, АПУ. There are areas where the commercial handling of Trademark Bugs could be reformed and improved, especially with respect to medical access in poorer nations. But we as legal theorists must not overlook the very powerful good that the Big Three pharma companies have accomplished in the space of less than seventy years.

Having invested trillions of dollars in research and development, these three companies developed cures for pathologies that had plagued humanity for hundreds of millennia: plague, cancer, auto-immune diseases, influenza, malaria, TB, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, myriad genetic conditions and fevers. This, in a sense, is what these companies existed to do; and whilst these cures represented a massive humanitarian good, they also embodied the power of commercial self-interest. Having achieved this set of goals, it is not realistic to believe that these companies would simply roll-themselves-up and cease trading. Indeed, under the well-established legal rule of corporate individuality, it would not be licit to expect them to commit suicide in this fashion. The distribution of Trademark Bugs – in every case, much milder diseases than the ‘feral’ illness that previously afflicted humanity – provided a viable commercial model by which these companies could continue to trade, with all the benefits that entailed in terms of employment, economic stimulus and so on.

The success of these Bugs was a function of two factors. One was the competitive pricing model adopted, whereby mild colds could be cured with cheap medicines, and only rarer, more serious illnesses required more expensive pharmaceuticals. Two was cultural inertia: people were used to getting sick with colds and flus, and they continued getting sick with these illnesses. The difference was that now they could be cured for a small financial outlay. High-profile media campaigns argued that if the companies ceased distributing their new modified bugs then the illnesses would stop happening altogether; but these failed to make significant inroads in many areas. Like taxation (discussed below), people broadly accept a degree of disease in their lives, provided only that the proportion does not rise too high.

The broader ethics of this practice are a matter for philosophical discussion; but on the practical plane the practice has been bedded-in as a fait accompli by its prodigious financial success. This money has altered the structure of global society in ways that are (arguably) both bad and good. It is worth, however, stressing the good.

The global spread of Trademark Bugs created the circumstances for titheing, which in turn shrunk nation-state tax collection. The Big Three are now, broadly speaking, responsible for the infrastructure, health, educational and military provision that used to be the preserve of countries. In effect the tax take has shifted from governments to these corporations. This is more ethical – since nobody is obliged to purchase the company cures, nobody is forced to pay ‘tax’ – and more practical. The ‘tax’ base has widened (since everybody is liable to infection) and consequently the actual rate has reduced from an average 17% of income (by-total-population) to an average 9% [Engell 2098]. Both these outcomes are improvements. More, previously people paid tax to government and often resented it; now people pay ‘tax’ for the immediate somatic relief of freedom from a pressing illness, and are grateful. There are compelling arguments [Iglesias 2098, Kaufmann, 2099] that corporations not only collect less tax, but disburse what they do collect more efficiently than did the old governments.

There is nothing immutable about any particular social model of structure of government. The only salient is that people are governed predictably, fairly and effectively. Attachment to the old systems merely for the sake of nostalgic attachment to tradition is illogical. The Big Three have effected a bloodless revolution and left the world, broadly speaking, better off.


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