The author ignores the main reason patents exist by pulling in emotional things. Sure, in a magical happy world it would be great to offer children in Africa fr

The author ignores the main reason patents exist by pulling in emotional things. Sure, in a magical happy world it would be great to offer children in Africa free AIDS medicine, but the fact of the matter is that millions of dollars go into getting a drug like that to market. It takes millions of dollars of research, millions of dollars to go through clinical trials, millions of dollars to go through FDA approvals, etc. And ultimately most drugs are very simple chemical compounds that could be easily synthesized in retrospect with the most basic of equipment. While it's certainly bad for companies to exploit the patent system and try to extort profit out of sick and dying people, that does not justify throwing out the protection altogether. If we threw out the patent system, none of the drug companies would spend the millions of dollars required to create things like a cure for AIDS as they would not make that money back because the next guy would just do some simple chromatography and have the same chemical compound synthesized for a fraction of the cost. What company is going to go tens of millions of dollars in debt with no hope of making that money back? When the incentive to do research is gone, we have no AIDS cure at all and in my opinion a world with no AIDS cure is worse than a world with an AIDS cure that's a bit expensive. There are many things that are broken with the patent system for sure, but throwing it out completely would cause many things to fall apart and cause catastrophic damage.