Or patents on live saving medication?
You can always buy someone else's grape, but sometimes there's only one cancer med.
You can always buy someone else's grape, but sometimes there's only one cancer med.
Doing any other kind of farming will simply become unviable.
I addressed this in an earlier thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761841
The correct price is 0, just looking at it from first principles.
But we don't like that because then these "idea products" have no incentive to get made, so we pretend like supplies are limited, we limit them with patents, we limit them with DRM, we limit them with laws, pretend it's scarce so the market can price it.
To many, this is an acceptable result. Buuuut... must we use a market for absolutely everything? Even if it's clearly broken in this use case and we're just pretending it works? The fact that we are pretending is fine, even when someone's life is on the line?
I think we need something like bug bounties for information. I think we need a different kind of market for novelty.
Non sequitur. Ideas generated (/recorded, transformed, interpreted, etc) by human labor or human capital are scarce because human labor and human capital are scarce.
> must we use a market for absolutely everything?
Certainly not, the more applicable question is whether the change we make to the status quo results in better conditions for people. Every economic system has strengths and weaknesses.
I don't disagree with the concept of a "bug bounty for information" but I'm struggling to come up with an idea of what that would look like in a way that is either more effective or different than patents.
That may seem pedantic, but that distinction is the thing we charge for access on.
The reason I'm harping on this is to make it black and white crystal clear, that the existing system we are using is a kludge. It would be shocking if such a system was flatly the best way to do things.
No idea what's better, but there are much smarter people out there than me.
How much effort in the medical industry is devoted to me-too treatments that don't really expand our therapeutic vocabulary? How many writers were focusing on writing Law & Order: Food Truck Inspectors Unit instead of something more distinctive?
I think that maybe we need to look into UBI for creatives: we'll pay you a comfortable living as long as you're regularly producing some deliverables/signs of progress, but you don't get to drag everyone else down with patents and copyrights when you're done. We could probably finance a lot of singers at 50k per year for the cost of one Rolling Stones tour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_grants_in_the_United_S...
Pharma grants have their own issues. Our current mixed system with both private investment and public investment allows us to leverage the strengths and weaknesses of both allocation schemes.