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Why would any commercial entity invest in things like drug development, crop development, etc; if the moment they actually bring something to market it's trivia
by skosuri 12y ago
Why would any commercial entity invest in things like drug development, crop development, etc; if the moment they actually bring something to market it's trivially copied and sold at cost?
- bovermyer 12y agoI'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted; it's an honest quesiton. Why does a business have to base its profits around a particular implementation of a thing?
- dionidium 12y ago> Why does a business have to base its profits around a particular implementation of a thing? That has nothing to do with it. It's a question of incentives. Patent supporters believe that a limited monopoly encourages innovation. That's it.
- hga 12y agoErrr, "a particular implementation of a thing" cannot be patented. It might be copyrightable (in the US, things with no creative content like a telephone book cannot be protected by copyright). GMOs are much more like inventions protectable by patents than creative works, like, say, an artificial form of life based on silicon. Not entirely different in principle than building a machine out of different mostly pre-fab parts, the combination of which is an invention.