It also doesn't mean the ecosystem is dependent, either. Disney made lots of money selling movies based on stories in the public domain. Just because a middlema

It also doesn't mean the ecosystem is dependent, either. Disney made lots of money selling movies based on stories in the public domain. Just because a middleman exists doesn't mean the middleman is paying the ultimate source in proportion to the money the middleman takes. See also the story of the insulin patent: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(17)30115-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8... > [Frederick] Banting felt “…that as a physician who had taken the Hippocratic oath he could not be party to any patenting of a discovery. ... John J R Macleod, with whom Banting shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, similarly declined to be named on the insulin patent. However, neither [Charles] Best, a medical student who had yet to swear the oath to Hippocrates, nor [James] Collip, a PhD biochemist, faced any ethical dilemma and were named as inventors, although for $1, Collip and Best transferred all rights, title, and interest to the Governors of the University of Toronto. Banting, Best, Collip, and MacLeod all believed that insulin should be made as widely available as possible, without any barriers such as cost.... (ht https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/5/12/15621952/insulin-price-increases https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/5/12/15621952/in... ht 'steveklabnik yesterday on Twitter) I think the proper conclusion is "no information" - the fact that redistributors are being paid what they're paid does not tell us anything positively or negatively about the necessity of them being paid what they're paid. You'd need to look at their actual costs, and more importantly the market of those costs: if they stopped paying researchers, what would the market effect be? (Perhaps they could fund research grants instead of discoveries, incentivizing everyone to work on the problems most interesting to them regardless of profitability, and thereby increasing research into cures for rare diseases.)