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Comment by waqf | Hacker News Reader

There's a big difference between drugs (which did legitimately cost someone at some point many millions to research and prove effective and safe) and music (which anyone with a modicum of talent can make in their garage and which costs millions only to market).

As a corollary, get your music from people with no marketing budget. They'll be forced to charge what it actually costs.

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Regarding drug cost and development, I wonder what the drug market would look like without patent law? Right now, and for the foreseeable future, drug R&D is expensive. If companies could not patent their drugs they would not make enough money off their product to be profitable. What would this do to the market?

One possible way it would work is that all drug development would be done by non-profits and government sponsored labs. Then drug R&D would be paid for directly by the people who want the drugs upfront and anyone could produce them. The final cost of drugs would be just a markup on the manufacturing cost.

The alternative is that people would not develop drugs, but I find it hard to believe that this would be the case.

The problem with drug research is that current incentives reward companies to focus on new (or sufficiently new to patent) medicines of little advantage and compete for market share at high prices, rather than to develop clinically superior medicines by focussing on social benefit vs costs. More publicly funded research into drugs with high social benefits would also help.

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