>Patents have never contributed anything to society.
I think I fixed that for you. Patents have only caused Corporations to battle each other and bully normal people into compliance
I think I fixed that for you. Patents have only caused Corporations to battle each other and bully normal people into compliance
Your company maybe won't spend a billion dollars on this research.
Maybe some govt funded research will work out, maybe a dozen other people will run into the discovery at some point.
A large majority of inventions by humans haven't been motivated by profit.
Were the large majority of drugs we use today (the topic discussed) invented outside the profit motive? I don't know the answer to that.
is the context.
You have to admit that that is, itself, out of context for the original post, which is strictly about software patents. But yeah, at that point it had morphed into something else.
We use teeny tiny variations of the drugs which are supposedly more effective but are also much more expensive.
Most other countries report significantly better healthcare outcomes with generic drugs.
In theory the government could nationalize the entire pharmaceutical industry but there is no evidence that bureaucrats are capable of reliably picking the right candidate drugs. Countries with weak IP protections do relatively little new drug development.
I'm not convinced that the govt bureaucrats would do a worse job than drug co bureaucrats. Current studies are poorly designed, implemented incorrectly, results are cherry-picked and gamed, p-hacking lives, ... This is an industry that can't even seem to accept pre-registration.
Also, as you say, most of these molecules come from publicly funded research. Why would the group funding the first set of research (and producing more molecules than industry) automatically be bad at the second?
In all, I'm not convinced that "Drug discovery is the easy part." If it was so easy, then why don't drug co's do it, and save the licensing fees?
Because licensing costs less and is risk-reduced?
People have different motivations and talents. Woz is a great computer engineer and Jobs was a great salesman. One without the other wouldn't have given us ubiquitous personal computers.
Same thing applies to organizations.
you already had to disclose the chemical formula for your drug. This paper only applies to software.
I'm not sure specifically about pharmaceutical companies, though. They may be an exception.
To me that's one of the worst things about modern pharmaceutical companies, they care more about making money than actually helping people.