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Comment by bermanoid | Hacker News Reader

Just FWIW, from what I've heard from people in the pharma industry, similar concerns over seriously sub-par counterfeit products are why they support legislation like this. It's not so much that they're worried about profits (counterfeit drugs don't hurt revenues by any significant factor for big drug companies), but that people can end up dying because of counterfeit drugs, either because they contain contaminants or do not contain the right amounts of the drugs that they should contain so the conditions end up untreated without the patients realizing. Both, I'm told, have happened in the real world on many occasions.

Not that this makes SOPA any more reasonable, of course, as it will cause a lot of trouble in other areas. But the anti-counterfeiting angle is bringing in quite a bit of support for it, and in many case it really is based on legitimate safety concerns rather than greed.

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Surely we can come up with a better technical solution for this!

Currently pharmaceutical companies try to prove authenticity by e.g. printing little holograms on the pillboxes, which is not very effective since pirates can print holograms too. How about this instead:

Each pillbox comes with a little paper which contains a random-looking string of characters and a trademark. It is folded-over and sealed so the contents are not readable. When an end-consumer wants to know if their drug is authentic or not, they tear open the paper, go to a website operated by (say) the US Patent and Trademark Office, and type in the trademark and character string (or scan a QR code). The website says "authentic"/"inauthentic"/"this string was already used".

On the production side, you can set it up so that the factory needs to communicate with a central company server to allocate codes, so you get an accurate count of how many codes are produced and if it matches the amount of drugs manufactured. This way, if an insider starts leaking codes to pirates it can be noticed quickly.

That would be a useful additional method.

But still, selling pillboxes under the name of "Foo" if your company in fact isn't called "Foo" should constitute some kind of fraud in my opinion.

Your talking about people who buy pills of the internet from spam emails. What makes you think "Remember to type in the letters on the government's site to check it" is something that would happen at all?

Fake pills is not a technical problem, so a technical solution is not required. You're just shifting blame to the customer.

Well, I wasn't primarily thinking about the internet pills. In many developing countries (particularly in south-east asia), something like 5-30% of all drugs are counterfeits without proper active ingredients (see e.g. http://www.bmj.com/content/324/7341/800.full). There are many skilled and motivated users (doctors) failing to detect the fakes because the packaging is identical.

Similarly, the rock climbers mentioned earlier in the thread probably would also be motivated to check authenticity?

I find the "a technical solution is not required" comment a bit odd. Spam is not a technical problem either, but we still use spam filters.

To precise, pharmaceutical companies are concerned that bad counterfeits will harm the reputation of their products, which will cut into order volume and profits.

Either way it's a legitimate concern. If you want to produce your own products, sell them under your own name. Counterfeits are piggybacking on the hard work of other people and I have no sympathy for people doing it.

It's interesting that some companies supporting SOPA do so because of sheer cluelessness on the matter. And it's ironic because SOPA will not stop the phenomenon.

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