4 ms·
Where's my incentive to do all that R&D? Curiosity, love, boredom, responsibility, etc... There are a lot of incentives other than profit and billions already
by ktizo 14y ago
Where's my incentive to do all that R&D?
Curiosity, love, boredom, responsibility, etc... There are a lot of incentives other than profit and billions already gets spent in R&D for reasons other than profit.
But if profit is your motive, and patents don't exist, you have several options. One of the interesting ones is that of monetising expertise. People will copy you, but you are also known globally as the expert, for the simple reason that you can prove you developed it. So you not only have a market made of the people who will buy the stuff, but also of those who want to learn off the expert how to build the stuff. To make the most of this requires good marketing, and an acceptance that you should be developing your next thing for when the money slows down from the current one as the market saturates, but that is the same as today anyway.
- creativename 14y agoWell that's good and well for an individual or a small group, but the classic case for patents is in things like pharmaceuticals. A patent protects someone from reverse-engineering something that a company may have spent years perfecting for hundred of millions of dollars.
- mbell 14y ago> but the classic case for patents is in things like pharmaceuticals That is also the classic case for patent abuse. Take a drug that works, tack on some non-active atoms somewhere, change the name, patent it, jack up the prices on the old drug when the patent is about to expire to push buyers to your new monopoly.
- danielweber 14y agoPlease explain how customers are locked into the "new monopoly." If Screwitall-A can now be made generically and works just as well as the newly made and patented Screwitall-B, customers are totally free to switch to -A if they care about the cost. (Customers usually don't care about cost, which is certainly a problem for holding down prices, but this doesn't seem anything like "patent abuse.")
- ktizo 14y agonewly made and patented Screwitall-B I assume this is the new trade name for a variation on Viagra.
- mbell 14y agoAll the money is in prescription drugs which isn't a 'free market' (speaking about the US here). I can't just order my generic prescription from whomever I want nor do I have unilateral control over what my doctor prescribes. The doctor may well have his/her own agenda.
- ktizo 14y agoPharmaceuticals are also the classic case for an existing massive public and charity funded research and development network for absolutely vital medicine, that the industry is not willing to do because the existing model is completely and utterly broken from a public health perspective.