[JamesBarney]

The patent's purpose is to incentivize innovation. Some industries need this (medical) others don't (software).

So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical).

Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways.

Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless you mean socializing drug discovery which would be a completely unproven way to develop drugs at scale.

[monocasa]

It's funny, I've heard from biomed engineers that it's clear to them that patents don't work in the medical field, unlike how they're effective in the software field.

It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.

[breck]

Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed.

I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry.

The whole thing is a big lie.

End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. We need to abolish them outright.

[JamesBarney]

Drugs are much easier to copy than software programs (i.e. there's no copyright protection).

And it currently costs billions of dollars to get FDA approval.

Basically assume I find a new antidepressant. I spend 2 billion dollars proving it's safe and effective.

How do I get my money back when any drug manufacturer can now manufacture the same drug?

[anticensor]

Not zero, but 3½ years for patents and 21 years (7+3½ per extension) for copyright is enough.

[hi_im_miles]

But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time?

I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”

Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.

I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.

[breck]

Agree with you and well put.

One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.

[andi999]

There is no extension (and even filing system) for copyright. Do you want to introduce that?

[anticensor]

Yes, and unregistered copyright would be treated as public domain.

[andi999]

So you write a letter and dont want it published by the recipient, you need to file? Or all software written in a company, file? What about confidential stuff, file?

[breck]

Tesla does not make hybrids. Ab initio.

[hi_im_miles]

Though this is only one person's personal experience, to me this was an illuminating conversation on the state of medical device repair as a consequence of strong IP protections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsJG2ODOcXA

[JamesBarney]

It costs close to a billion dollars to being a drug to market. Who's going to spend that kind of money if there's no patent protection?

[hi_im_miles]

The problem is that there is no way to experiment with other ways of funding health care research, as the cost of doing so is set at highly entrenched monopoly prices. There is no reason for those with capital to consider alternatives when there is already so much money to be made in the existing system.

I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.