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Medical research is protected by patents, which are different from copyright. Their term is shorter (that's good) and they have exhaustion (even better). Patent
by est31 7y ago
Medical research is protected by patents, which are different from copyright. Their term is shorter (that's good) and they have exhaustion (even better). Patents protect not just medical research but also engineering research, etc. It's a good idea to have them in general, as people otherwise employ secrecy over their methods and might not invest into research at all as it's not lucrative. Software patents are a very bad idea and quite counter productive though.
- hutzlibu 7y agoSure, sure, but obviously in the hypothetical scenario of a world without copyright I meant also without patents. In general I believe the idea of intellectual property is wrong and innovation blocking. But since we live in a world with it by default, it is hard to prove it right or wrong. And it is very hard to prove it small scale, since the big industry woukd just use the work of a small inventor without any compensation if they don't have to, just like with open source. And to the point of the example of patents and secrecy I would add, that for example Elon Musk decided insome cases to not make a patent, because it is a blueprint for others. (don't have the link right now)