ABSTRACT
The TRIPS Agreement has imposed worldwide a single regime for encouraging pharmaceutical innovation through monopoly patents. Pricing advanced medicines out of the reach of poor patients and encouraging neglect of diseases concentrated among them, this regime produces avoidable disease and death on a massive scale. Appeal to natural rights of innovators cannot defend this regime: Their efforts can justify ownership of things (apples, medically effective molecules), not ownership of types of thing (a kind of fruit or molecule). Appeal to mutual advantage cannot defend the regime: Monopoly constraints on free market interaction impose great costs on the poor who often do not benefit from monopoly-driven innovation.
