| > It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow. Oracle's income is proportionate to the number of licenses people buy, with some revenue from services thrown in too. I don't know the percentages of each one in the total, but to state that drastically fewer licenses would not lead to much less revenue seems somewhat disconnected from reality. > So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months? Because, like I said, it's a compromise. We as a society pick a number that best balances the needs of IP producers and consumers. In theory. In practice, I don't think the numbers are ideal right now, and should be rebalanced. However, there's a big difference between some rejigging and throwing out the system in its entirety. > And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded. Democracy is a messy, inefficient system too: it just happens to be better than the alternatives. If you don't have a superior system to propose, throwing out the existing one seems like a very ill-conceived experiment. |