> If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development. I'd

> If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development. I'd like to see any evidence at all for this. The closest thing we have to a controlled experiment is the software industry, where patents are a) difficult to obtain, at least in a way analogous to patenting a molecule and b) not culturally common among large portions of the R&D community. There is a huge amount of R&D into better databases, better operating systems, better distributed systems, better UIs, better programming languages, better compilers, etc. etc. that happens with no patent protection, and often with no license fees or other direct monetary compensation at all. Microsoft being willing to keep their source code secret and patent their techniques didn't help NT defeat Linux one bit, and certainly has caused no loss of people willing to work on Linux.