All good news, right?

Wrong, says Jamie Love. It's just slick humanitarian-flavored spin.

For Love, one of the leading -- and most outspoken -- activists on the front lines of the AIDS-drug pricing wars, the real issue is that the major pharmaceutical companies still maintain control over who can manufacture their patented drugs and how much they cost. As the head of the Ralph Nader-founded Consumer Project on Technology, Love has been trying for years to persuade governments in developing nations to wrest control of AIDS-drug policy and pricing from the pharmaceuticals. Love argues that by issuing so-called compulsory licenses that would allow generic drug manufacturers to create cheap and ubiquitous versions of AIDS drugs, developing nations would drive down the cost of raw materials, increase competition and make the drugs more widely available.

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Love is unimpressed by the fact that pharmaceutical companies, pressured by public opinion and media coverage, have taken positive steps to make AIDS drugs cheaper and easier to get. In almost every case, as he points out, they are simply dropping prices or just giving the pills away rather than granting licenses for local manufacture. And he doesn't believe that corporate largess alone will be enough to stave off one of the worst epidemics in human history.

Love has been engaged in the drug intellectual property debate since the early '90s. His absolute and uncompromising pursuit hasn't won him any friends in the pharmaceutical industry or in bureaucrat-magnet Geneva: He accuses officials in the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that control the global AIDS agenda of being lazy, timorous salary collectors who go out of their way to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies.

More fundamentally, Love denies that the pharmaceuticals even own the rights to the drugs in the first place. He points out that many of the anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV and AIDS today stem from the government-funded cancer drug research of the 1980s. The rights to government-created innovations were sold to pharmaceutical companies at low prices (not at the astronomical rates demanded in recent airwave spectrum auctions, for example), guaranteeing companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb huge returns on investment. Given the public investment in these drugs, Love doesn't believe drug companies have the moral authority to determine who can or can't access them. And the fact that thousands of people in Africa continue to die because they can't afford the drugs adds urgency to his argument.

Love's position that Big Pharma doesn't own its medicines is an extension of his earlier work on cancer medicine patents. In 1991, he testified before Congress about a patent agreement between the federal government and Bristol-Myers Squibb that allowed the company to extend its patent protection for the cancer drug Taxol. The drug was invented by the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute -- and it brought the drug company $1.6 billion a year in profits. Scrutiny led Congress to demand better accounting of the relationship between government-funded operations and pharmaceutical companies to determine whether the government was getting an adequate return on its investment. The Taxol case turned out to be a major precedent, since government funds have also been used to create other drugs for cancer, AIDS and other chronic or life-threatening conditions.

"Jamie, it seems to me, starts from a simple but hard-to-refute premise," says New York University journalism professor Merrill Goozner, who covered the drug industry as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune for years. "If the taxpayers paid for the development of the intellectual property, then they ought to get some kind of return on their investment when that I.P. turns out to be a significant scientific advance that leads to new products."

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