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I think the thing that is unique about drugs is that they are incredibly expensive to develop and bring to market, but trivially cheap to reproduce. I just happ
by creato 6y ago
I think the thing that is unique about drugs is that they are incredibly expensive to develop and bring to market, but trivially cheap to reproduce. I just happened to watch this video [1] a few days ago, where the host gets, as a free sample, enough of a chemical to make $3 million at retail prices worth of a cancer drug.
That doesn't seem to be true of anything else covered by patents. Software is cheap to develop, and other kinds of engineered products (cars, hardware, etc.) usually aren't that much cheaper to reproduce than they are to develop.
I think patents should simply be far more expensive. For a drug (or a chip manufacturer or whatever), even a very expensive patent would be negligible relative to the R&D costs. However, it would make a lot of bullshit patents not worth getting.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XGfnmTm8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XGfnmTm8E
- gentleman11 6y agoExpensive patents would price out hard tech startups
- defnotashton2 6y agoPatents are already expensive enough to stifle innovation and even more expensive to enforce. This is already happening when they aren't artificially raised because of inherent costs in our legal system. I think modern drug manufacturing is a lot more nuanced then oh I can copy this chemical. And if it is then that's life of a drug manufacturer, you build that into the price. Like everybody else, I think it's a false political narrative that drugs are magically nuanced in ways other things aren't.