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Patents encourage innovation by rewarding creators. We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. The reason to d

Patents encourage innovation by rewarding creators. We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. The reason to ditch software patents is copyright already protects software. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.

charcircuit 5y ago
>We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?
- friedman23 5y ago
  Not who you are responding to but yes, looking at the history of MRNA vaccine research I believe that these vaccines (MRNA specifically) wouldn't exist without the massive payoff that could come from a patent. edit: my comment went against the worldview of some ideological drones and they decided to downvote me instead of actually responding. There is a reason that MRNA was developed in countries with strong IP rights and countries without those rights are relying on century old technology to develop their vaccines.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Don't worry, I was downvoted too! America has produced by far the most medical advancements in the modern era. What people don't recognize about the lower cost of drugs in countries like Canada is that they effectively have government price controls. If we were to do the same here, it would greatly limit R&D into new treatments. However, there are of course other ways to reduce cost to the consumer without harming the rich ecosystem of biotech. Important to understand this dynamic when adjusting laws, because it would be very easy to totally kill medical innovation
  - burnished 5y ago
    I down voted you for the 'drone' remark.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Patents are an exchange. I share my invention, you provide protection so I can recoup the costs of creation. Without them, there is little incentive to create, and much more incentive to rip off someone else's work. The result would be a reduction of technology that would put luddites to shame. If we got rid of the patent system today, there would probably still be vaccines 5 years from today because of the prior investment. But, in 100 years, the only people who could get vaccines would be the ultra wealthy, and 100 years after that we would lose the knowledge to create a lot of new technology because the old tech never sufficiently made it into the public sphere.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Without patent protection, there's very little financial incentive to invent new pharmaceuticals. Anything you come up with could be copied and produced for pennies on the dollars by any number of companies. Of course, the cost to produce most medicines is quite low. So you have to invest a high fixed cost in R&D, at great risk of failure, and in the end you don't recoup any of that cost. When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down. Some other system could probably work, but free market R&D would fail without protections to profit from creations. I suspect trying to replace the free market system with some quasi-public one would not produce as many innovations.
  - js8 5y ago
    In the case of the pandemic, people have other incentives than financial. I don't agree, it seems to me that almost nobody who innovates does it for money, people do it for fame, curiosity, desire to fix a problem. (All progress depends on unreasonable men.) Rather, it's people who organize innovators who do it for money, and the question if they need to be renumerated in patents is legitimate.
    - johncolanduoni 5y ago
      The innovators in pharmaceutical research need large amounts of money to run the studies to show safety and effectiveness of their inventions, to say nothing of the even more hit or miss discovery process. It’s conceivable we could pay for that in a different manner than patents and high US drug prices, but that cost can’t just be handwaved away.
  - schwank 5y ago
    "When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down." This assertion is simply not true. A prime example - Insulin is 100 years old. Those who need it are paying sky high prices due to corporate greed, and many simply can't afford it. No competition, no affordable option. People are dying due to this greed.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
The polio vaccine was given away for free.
- friedman23 5y ago
  Ok, now please elaborate on how the research and investment that was needed to develop the polio vaccine in any way resembled the amount of research and investment required for modern day vaccines?
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    How lazy do you have to be to ask someone else to make your argument for you? Craft your own arguments.
    - friedman23 5y ago
      As lazy as the original commenter making a statement that isn't backed by any evidence.
knowledge-clay 5y ago
> We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Pay them with public funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The difficulty with this is choosing what to fund in what amount. Bureaucracies are quite bad at this. Patents solve this by using the market. If you patent some garbage, nobody buys it and you make no money. If you invent something ingenious that everybody wants once it exists but nobody else would have thought to offer a prize for before it existed, you make a lot of money.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    If a company proves their vaccine "works" it would make sense for a government to want to buy it from them.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? If they get to keep the patent unless the government is willing to pay the market price, you have a patent system. If not, they're doing research on faith that some unspecified money might possibly fall from the sky. Also, now there is only one buyer. Say six different companies all develop working vaccines. Is the government going to buy all of them? What about the tenth or hundredth? If not, what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? And vaccines are something we know ahead of time that we want. How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        >Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? There would be no patents. >Also, now there is only one buyer. You could also sell them to other governments, hospitals, people, etc. >what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? It's possible for competing products to exist. Is yours cheaper or more effective than your competitors? If you wanted your money building a bad product then tough luck. >How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet? How do you make a vaccine for a disease that you don't know about? You don't. I'm not sure why you are talking about prizes. Along with just selling them normally, you could also have an unlock system like kickstarter. If you raise $x then they will release the drug, or they could kickstart the entire process. Or instead of a kickstarter they could find investors.
js8 5y ago
I may be wrong, but I thought mRNA vaccine was only developed after key patents for it have expired. Whether patents help or hinder innovation seems to depend on how general the patented idea is. If it's really broadly applicable, they hinder it IMHO. I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  That patents expire is not a bug, it's a feature. Patents are an exchange for temporary protection. > I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen. The researcher can't make money without some form of protection. You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies.
  - js8 5y ago
    > You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies. But why is the big company stealing it? Currently, it makes sense to steal it because the patent protections make it seem as if the idea itself is valuable (and can be a private property not commons). But in the world without the patents, what is valuable is the physical implementation, or rather, the coupling of both. It has been pointed out that you have many cases in free market economy with a similar problem. iPhone, for example, has very little innovation in it, it's just an idea executed well, based on past things like Palm Pilot for example. It seems to me, to have fair patents, you need to assume that value of everything can be broken to additive pieces - value of this idea, that idea, and then the value of the materials and energy from which it is built. But this is really hard, because things have value that also comes from combining these things. (In general, this is a problem with free market with respect to labor too, because you cannot really meaningfully determine what contribution of different types of labor is more valuable for the product to arise, but at the same time, the people need to be remunerated for the labor somehow.) On the other hand, in the world without patents, we assume that value of everything can be broken to little pieces (not so valuable by themselves) that are added by individuals in small amounts. So if all innovation is in the commons, no need to toil for 20 years to invent something. You build a little piece, add it to the pile, and everybody benefits because at the end of the day, you take lot more from the pile than you put in.
erik_seaberg 5y ago
At 63–75 years, programmable general-purpose computers and networks are so new that it’s still possible to claim the most obvious solution to many problems simply by being first to think about them. USPTO’s bar for what is “obvious” is skewed towards older subjects with a lot more written and indexed prior art for an examiner to cite, and doesn’t weigh likelihood of easy reinvention. And now there’s enough money at stake to trigger a land rush to fence off entire problems using solutions that just don’t merit protection.

charcircuit 5y ago

>We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?

friedman23 5y ago
Not who you are responding to but yes, looking at the history of MRNA vaccine research I believe that these vaccines (MRNA specifically) wouldn't exist without the massive payoff that could come from a patent. edit: my comment went against the worldview of some ideological drones and they decided to downvote me instead of actually responding. There is a reason that MRNA was developed in countries with strong IP rights and countries without those rights are relying on century old technology to develop their vaccines.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Don't worry, I was downvoted too! America has produced by far the most medical advancements in the modern era. What people don't recognize about the lower cost of drugs in countries like Canada is that they effectively have government price controls. If we were to do the same here, it would greatly limit R&D into new treatments. However, there are of course other ways to reduce cost to the consumer without harming the rich ecosystem of biotech. Important to understand this dynamic when adjusting laws, because it would be very easy to totally kill medical innovation
- burnished 5y ago
  I down voted you for the 'drone' remark.
unityByFreedom 5y ago
Patents are an exchange. I share my invention, you provide protection so I can recoup the costs of creation. Without them, there is little incentive to create, and much more incentive to rip off someone else's work. The result would be a reduction of technology that would put luddites to shame. If we got rid of the patent system today, there would probably still be vaccines 5 years from today because of the prior investment. But, in 100 years, the only people who could get vaccines would be the ultra wealthy, and 100 years after that we would lose the knowledge to create a lot of new technology because the old tech never sufficiently made it into the public sphere.
adam_arthur 5y ago
Without patent protection, there's very little financial incentive to invent new pharmaceuticals. Anything you come up with could be copied and produced for pennies on the dollars by any number of companies. Of course, the cost to produce most medicines is quite low. So you have to invest a high fixed cost in R&D, at great risk of failure, and in the end you don't recoup any of that cost. When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down. Some other system could probably work, but free market R&D would fail without protections to profit from creations. I suspect trying to replace the free market system with some quasi-public one would not produce as many innovations.
- js8 5y ago
  In the case of the pandemic, people have other incentives than financial. I don't agree, it seems to me that almost nobody who innovates does it for money, people do it for fame, curiosity, desire to fix a problem. (All progress depends on unreasonable men.) Rather, it's people who organize innovators who do it for money, and the question if they need to be renumerated in patents is legitimate.
  - johncolanduoni 5y ago
    The innovators in pharmaceutical research need large amounts of money to run the studies to show safety and effectiveness of their inventions, to say nothing of the even more hit or miss discovery process. It’s conceivable we could pay for that in a different manner than patents and high US drug prices, but that cost can’t just be handwaved away.
- schwank 5y ago
  "When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down." This assertion is simply not true. A prime example - Insulin is 100 years old. Those who need it are paying sky high prices due to corporate greed, and many simply can't afford it. No competition, no affordable option. People are dying due to this greed.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

The polio vaccine was given away for free.

friedman23 5y ago
Ok, now please elaborate on how the research and investment that was needed to develop the polio vaccine in any way resembled the amount of research and investment required for modern day vaccines?
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  How lazy do you have to be to ask someone else to make your argument for you? Craft your own arguments.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    As lazy as the original commenter making a statement that isn't backed by any evidence.

knowledge-clay 5y ago

> We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Pay them with public funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The difficulty with this is choosing what to fund in what amount. Bureaucracies are quite bad at this. Patents solve this by using the market. If you patent some garbage, nobody buys it and you make no money. If you invent something ingenious that everybody wants once it exists but nobody else would have thought to offer a prize for before it existed, you make a lot of money.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  If a company proves their vaccine "works" it would make sense for a government to want to buy it from them.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? If they get to keep the patent unless the government is willing to pay the market price, you have a patent system. If not, they're doing research on faith that some unspecified money might possibly fall from the sky. Also, now there is only one buyer. Say six different companies all develop working vaccines. Is the government going to buy all of them? What about the tenth or hundredth? If not, what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? And vaccines are something we know ahead of time that we want. How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      >Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? There would be no patents. >Also, now there is only one buyer. You could also sell them to other governments, hospitals, people, etc. >what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? It's possible for competing products to exist. Is yours cheaper or more effective than your competitors? If you wanted your money building a bad product then tough luck. >How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet? How do you make a vaccine for a disease that you don't know about? You don't. I'm not sure why you are talking about prizes. Along with just selling them normally, you could also have an unlock system like kickstarter. If you raise $x then they will release the drug, or they could kickstart the entire process. Or instead of a kickstarter they could find investors.

js8 5y ago

I may be wrong, but I thought mRNA vaccine was only developed after key patents for it have expired. Whether patents help or hinder innovation seems to depend on how general the patented idea is. If it's really broadly applicable, they hinder it IMHO. I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
That patents expire is not a bug, it's a feature. Patents are an exchange for temporary protection. > I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen. The researcher can't make money without some form of protection. You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies.
- js8 5y ago
  > You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies. But why is the big company stealing it? Currently, it makes sense to steal it because the patent protections make it seem as if the idea itself is valuable (and can be a private property not commons). But in the world without the patents, what is valuable is the physical implementation, or rather, the coupling of both. It has been pointed out that you have many cases in free market economy with a similar problem. iPhone, for example, has very little innovation in it, it's just an idea executed well, based on past things like Palm Pilot for example. It seems to me, to have fair patents, you need to assume that value of everything can be broken to additive pieces - value of this idea, that idea, and then the value of the materials and energy from which it is built. But this is really hard, because things have value that also comes from combining these things. (In general, this is a problem with free market with respect to labor too, because you cannot really meaningfully determine what contribution of different types of labor is more valuable for the product to arise, but at the same time, the people need to be remunerated for the labor somehow.) On the other hand, in the world without patents, we assume that value of everything can be broken to little pieces (not so valuable by themselves) that are added by individuals in small amounts. So if all innovation is in the commons, no need to toil for 20 years to invent something. You build a little piece, add it to the pile, and everybody benefits because at the end of the day, you take lot more from the pile than you put in.

erik_seaberg 5y ago

At 63–75 years, programmable general-purpose computers and networks are so new that it’s still possible to claim the most obvious solution to many problems simply by being first to think about them. USPTO’s bar for what is “obvious” is skewed towards older subjects with a lot more written and indexed prior art for an examiner to cite, and doesn’t weigh likelihood of easy reinvention. And now there’s enough money at stake to trigger a land rush to fence off entire problems using solutions that just don’t merit protection.