Letter: It's not theft when lives are at stake

From Elliott Bignell

John Walker equates producing a drug patented by someone else with theft
(21 April, p 54).
This is too simplistic. One can only steal that which is owned
by somebody else, and ownership is a purely legal concept with shades of meaning
dependent on the local legal environment.

In India, drugs companies do not “own” patents on healthcare products,
because the law does not recognise them as property. If the drugs companies have
spent their money developing unpatentable technologies, that is their own
lookout.

Under almost any legal system, the sincere intention to save life is
mitigation or a defence against most charges, up to and including murder. Are we
seriously to believe that developing countries will abandon not only this
pragmatic principle but also their duty to the lives and security of their own
populations in order to enact legislation putting the profits of foreign
corporations first?

Would we expect the US and British governments to abandon their nuclear
programmes to honour patents held in India or China?

Überlingen, Germany