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What right? Copyrights & Patents are not natural in a free market; they're government creations. Remember patents and copyright only exist to encourage people

What right? Copyrights & Patents are not natural in a free market; they're government creations. Remember patents and copyright only exist to encourage people to produce, not because you're entitled to profit from it. As of right now there is very little in the way of evidence that patents in anyway contribute to encouraging people to produce. Most small companies don't even bother patenting ideas because they don't have the time or the money to.

billybob 17y ago
This is a VERY important point: copyright (and other IP) exists to benefit the PUBLIC by promoting the creation of new works. Granting temporary monopolies is a means to that end. From the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So: some people may create software, incentivized partly by the prospect of patenting it. Other people will be unable to create or sell software, because of those same patents. The question is, which factor is larger? If software patents are decreasing the amount of good software being produced for the public benefit, then the public no longer has a reason to grant them. Has that point been reached? Many say yes. And the same logic may apply to other areas of IP.
ghshephard 17y ago
"As of right now there is very little in the way of evidence that patents in anyway contribute to encouraging people to produce." There are untold exception to this - It's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Drug Patents, in particular, are incredibly important. Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it? Remember - Patents are good for only a short period of time, under twenty years in most countries, and after that it's a free for all - anyone can use the process's and systems that were shared and documented. With all that said - 90% of the software patents really are nothing more than crap - usually consisting of an engineer having an idea that most of their "skilled and educated in the arts" peers could have come up with in less than a week's worth of work and discussion. Public-Key cryptography class patents are few and far between.
- kelnos 17y ago
  Somewhat hypothetical, but: how difficult is it to reverse-engineer a drug's exact composition with only the final product (the pill/vaccine/etc. itself)? If it's difficult enough to be economically infeasible, then patent protection here could be replaced by simply keeping the drug a secret. Of course, that kills the generics market, and I suspect it's not such a difficult problem to RE a drug, but... just curious.
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    That is exactly what companies would do, with the resulting loss in the knowledge of how to make these drugs to society.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    They have to disclose the contents to be licensed for medical purposes. My wife did a stint as a student with AstraZeneca (global pharma corp) they were making "new" drugs. One thing they do is take an existing drug and try swapping out different parts for functionally equivalent parts and run tests to see if the drug is effective enough to warrant proper trials and check to see if it circumvents the opposition patents.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    It actually takes India about 6 months to reverse engineer a drug. It's not that hard.
- dantheman 17y ago
  Agreed, I do recognize that patenting physical things has benefits. My earlier post was with respect to software patents only. I'm against patents and copyright for ethical reasons, but software patents have no excuse for existing.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it? Patents, and Supplementary Protection Certs (SPC) which extend drug patents to 25 yrs in the UK IIRC, are temporary. Also it's always worth remembering that drug companies spend vastly more (3 times, might even be 4) on marketing than on producing drugs and make humongous profits.

billybob 17y ago

This is a VERY important point: copyright (and other IP) exists to benefit the PUBLIC by promoting the creation of new works. Granting temporary monopolies is a means to that end. From the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So: some people may create software, incentivized partly by the prospect of patenting it. Other people will be unable to create or sell software, because of those same patents. The question is, which factor is larger? If software patents are decreasing the amount of good software being produced for the public benefit, then the public no longer has a reason to grant them. Has that point been reached? Many say yes. And the same logic may apply to other areas of IP.

ghshephard 17y ago

"As of right now there is very little in the way of evidence that patents in anyway contribute to encouraging people to produce." There are untold exception to this - It's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Drug Patents, in particular, are incredibly important. Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it? Remember - Patents are good for only a short period of time, under twenty years in most countries, and after that it's a free for all - anyone can use the process's and systems that were shared and documented. With all that said - 90% of the software patents really are nothing more than crap - usually consisting of an engineer having an idea that most of their "skilled and educated in the arts" peers could have come up with in less than a week's worth of work and discussion. Public-Key cryptography class patents are few and far between.

kelnos 17y ago
Somewhat hypothetical, but: how difficult is it to reverse-engineer a drug's exact composition with only the final product (the pill/vaccine/etc. itself)? If it's difficult enough to be economically infeasible, then patent protection here could be replaced by simply keeping the drug a secret. Of course, that kills the generics market, and I suspect it's not such a difficult problem to RE a drug, but... just curious.
- ghshephard 17y ago
  That is exactly what companies would do, with the resulting loss in the knowledge of how to make these drugs to society.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  They have to disclose the contents to be licensed for medical purposes. My wife did a stint as a student with AstraZeneca (global pharma corp) they were making "new" drugs. One thing they do is take an existing drug and try swapping out different parts for functionally equivalent parts and run tests to see if the drug is effective enough to warrant proper trials and check to see if it circumvents the opposition patents.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  It actually takes India about 6 months to reverse engineer a drug. It's not that hard.
dantheman 17y ago
Agreed, I do recognize that patenting physical things has benefits. My earlier post was with respect to software patents only. I'm against patents and copyright for ethical reasons, but software patents have no excuse for existing.
pbhjpbhj 17y ago
Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it? Patents, and Supplementary Protection Certs (SPC) which extend drug patents to 25 yrs in the UK IIRC, are temporary. Also it's always worth remembering that drug companies spend vastly more (3 times, might even be 4) on marketing than on producing drugs and make humongous profits.