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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

It can be, and it is for me. I'm against all of it.

Do you realize how much it costs to take a drug from the lab to the market? If there were no IP laws virtually all private drug development would stop.

You have black and white beliefs in a grey world.

And do you realise how twisted the goals of corporations become when they operate in a world entirely motivated by profit?

What are you trying to say here exactly? We shouldn't have privately funded drug research?

Yes, capitalism has some bad side effects. That is not a reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.

I was irritated and fell back upon the Socratic method, it's condescending, I'm sorry. It may be that dismantling IP would have the effects you describe. But I would argue that this is not necessarily an argument against IP, it could also be an argument against the current architecture of our economic systems. We need to design them in such a way that these kinds of fundamental conflicts either don't arise or find themselves balanced appropriately. I was saying that maybe rather than throwing out a good idea because it does not fit into the current paradigm, we should address the paradigm itself. We probably do not know enough about large scale complex systems to address this issue appropriately, but we should begin the dialog and arguments like this are too narrow in scope.

I've heard that argument many times, and I really find it hard to believe. Would the landscape of the market change? Absolutely, but saying that it would disappear seems like fiction.

So, my question for against your statement is, if IP laws changed, why do you think that drug regulations (and everything else that drives up cost-to-market) would remain the same?

So....we shouldn't have animal and human trials of drugs before bringing them to market? Those are incredibly expensive regulations that I guess we could remove. Do you realize how many years it takes to bring a drug to market, and the kind of salary that the researchers require? Not even counting the hundreds of study participants for the various human trials. The last phase is massive involving multiple hospitals and thousands of hospital visits for the patients.

If another company could just start making that same drug as soon as it is proved safe and effective they could bypass over a decade of development costs that the other company ate(typically for many drugs since most fail so more like 4+ man-decades of development and trial costs). They could sell the drug for purely the manufacturing costs and have an equivalent product.

No one with capitalistic motivations would privately fund drug research in a market like this because it would make no sense.

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