Not sure pricing to recoup costs is artificial.
I do think that corporate price gouging is a huge problem that does need to be addressed. But especially with smaller business types — creatives, et al— I still haven’t gotten any grownup answers about what would compel people to get professionally good at something and innovate in the complete absence of copyright: the vastly better business model would be waiting for someone else to do something new and interesting, stealing their work, and then undercutting them in the market because you don’t have R&D/et al costs to recoup. You can’t say that wouldn’t happen because it’s exactly what the AI companies did to billions of people, scoffing at any protest. And ironically, they’re now whining about the Chinese doing it to them.
I have, however, met a ton of very well-paid tech workers that were extremely against copyright, entirely, especially where it came to paying artists, such as musicians, for their labor. Pretty ironic because the market for software development labor market would probably land somewhere between graphic designers and company IT worker if the commercial software business had no IP protection.
For the rest of us, that giant increase in revenue is an increase in our healthcare costs.
I think I can spot a flaw in that logic.
If supply was not artificially restricted (through patents), then competitors would be able to manufacture the drug, supply would expand, the price would collapse, and the original inventor would not be able to recover their R&D costs.
But yes, the reason brand name drugs are drugs are more expensive than generics is due to intellectual property, both the patent and the trademark.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prizes--not-pat...
My point was to whether it was artificial not whether it was bad.
We can have artificial interventions in markets, and that can be a net benefit and a good thing.
I’m not sure why everyone is responding as if “artificial” and “bad” are the same thing