However, what you might see as a normal part of business (finding the cheapest sources for your products), some companies want to make illegal. We've seen the British music industry freak out when a vendor imported legitimate CDs from Asia to the UK, exposing the record labels' price discrimination that resulted in inflated prices for CDs there. The BPI (that country's equivalent of the RIAA) argued that the importer was somehow violating their members' copyrights, even though it was importing legally purchased, legitimate discs, and has been awarded 41 million pounds in damages from CD-Wow, the importer. Now, though, it's drug companies that are starting to get worked up (via WSJ Health Blog) about parallel imports, for exactly the same reason: they expose their price discrimination and threaten their margins. Middlemen in the EU take advantage of price differences throughout the continent, buying drugs where they're cheapest, repackaging them, and then selling them in countries where prices are higher (but still undercutting the manufacturer's price). Drug companies, like the music industry, have concocted a flimsy argument against the practice, saying it contributes to counterfeiting and threatens public safety. Of course, they fail to point out how last week, UK regulators found the first case of counterfeit drugs to go through parallel importers -- but the fakes were discovered only because they were pointed out by the importer. The head of a European drug company says his biggest priority is "the integrity and transparency"
by Carlo Longino - Techdirt
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http://www.parallelimportseurope.com
http://www.parallelimportsworld.com
http://www.parallelimportsasia.com
