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Except it isn't economically feasible to have a lawyer army and to try to keep millions of NDAs under wrap. But you come at it from the perspective that you ju
by zanny 13y ago
Except it isn't economically feasible to have a lawyer army and to try to keep millions of NDAs under wrap.
But you come at it from the perspective that you just clonk down our culture and psyche around information into a world without IP and everything goes to shit.
In reality, businesses evolve and adapt. Rather than consider r&d a capital investment in future revenue, your r&d budget is a public service - something you would want either cultural pressure to coerce out of businesses (I'm also a libertarian, and IP is just raw governmental power) but you could also argue from the socialist perspective the idea of using violent coercion of the state to transfer wealth into r&d.
Either way, you are not researching to create profit. And I would argue you don't need to anymore. The things people want are things people will pay money to see developed. Not pay for in the end product, but pay the researchers up front. Instead of sitting back and hoping a cure for Parkinsons gets funded by a medical megacorp looking to profit off the IP, you throw money at Parkinsons thinktanks, and can appraise them on an individual basis for their merits, and put money where your mouth is for the things you care about.
And then the rest can be voluntary. For the most part today many of our modern revolutions are voluntary - everything from standardized Internet protocols to tcp/ip were all developed not as for profit ideas but as standards to elevate humanity, and we reaped huge benefits from them.
Because all that money spent today on R&D, and today on the patent lawsuits and lawyers, and today on policing every corner of society to ban thoughts and numbers, could be spent funding the research you want.
Because it is a value proposition in whatever regime you have, but I am of the opinion that those who value research into certain fields would throw money at it regardless of profit motive because they want the end product, not the potential capital gain. I'd even argue that is a more effective way to develop innovation, because if your goal is the invention and not the profit afterwards, you have much greater clarity of vision to meet your goals.
- twoodfin 13y agoyou throw money at Parkinsons thinktanks, and can appraise them on an individual basis for their merits, and put money where your mouth is for the things you care about. Historically, the "throw money at it" approach to solving problems has not been particularly successful. We're not just talking about a single disease, we're talking about thousands upon thousands of illnesses. Markets are the most efficient mechanism we have yet discovered for the productive allocation of resources. Unless you can show how you'd bring that power to bear on practical medical research in the absence of IP, you're stuck telling a story about how this time, some bureaucracy will get the job done. I'm shocked any libertarian really believes that.