[TrackerFF]

It would be an interesting experiment - a world where no patents exist, only production (though corporate espionage / theft is still illegal).

Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup all that cost, before their patent runs out.

Would it lead to more money spent on making reverse engineering difficult? Both the products, and the manufacturing process.

[runako]

The other aspect of patents that folks are omitting is that in order to get a patent, the applicant has to publish their recipe. In most cases, this will be strictly better than simple reverse engineering because more participants can then use the IP once it expires (as opposed to those with the means and desire to reverse engineer it).

Patents are a two-way street where society gets something in exchange for granting a limited-duration monopoly.

[lelanthran]

> Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering,

Reverse engineering is not needed - it's time-consuming, expensive and error-prone.

The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!

As much as some people hate to admit it, intellectual property laws have their place. Are they perfect? Not in my opinion! But, things would be worse without enforced intellectual property laws.

[derivagral]

> The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!

This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.

[lelanthran]

> This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.

What incentive could you possible offer them? If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's trade secrets, all they have to do is offer a key person $500k/year salary.

If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's patent, they are going to pay you for it.

And, as someone who's actually been in court more than a few times, no, they won't kill you via legal bills in a long protracted court case (say, by violating the IP) to get the IP - that happens so rarely you may as well hope for significant winnings at a casino.

And even if they pursue a protracted legal battle hoping to kill the company to acquire the IP, then they have to bid on the open market for it, against other FAANGs!

And even if they do kill the company, then they still have to deal with whoever gets the IP (which is why that strategy is almost never viable), because that IP doesn't become public domain simply because the company died, it will go to someone, somewhere.

[jampekka]

R&D can be done without profit motive. Most R is done in universities without profit motive.

Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.

[mrguyorama]

Everyone lionizes the 1900s as this massive period of innovation. Part of the way we got here is by INVALIDATING PATENTS

When the world beat Germany (twice), part of the reparations for the world wars was basically invalidating most of Germany's intellectual property. The second world war we went above that and basically claimed human beings who were working on that intellectual property.

When America was struggling to get useful radar to work, the British brought us the cavity magnetron, and the US was able to utterly industrialize that into a million allied radar systems. When the US thought jet engines were a dead end fuel hungry fad, the Brits showed us theirs, which was way more advanced and helped the US get on the right track for future development.

When everyone was basically inventing computers as a real thing, the allies benefited greatly from massive cross-pollination, including people who are now considered grandfathers of modern computing literally meeting in a train station and chatting about the computers they were building which helped them work together to build bigger and better machines.

You don't advance innovation and invention by limiting an idea to the six people working R&D on this specific concept in GE, you advance innovation by letting every smart person and their friend dick around with the concept in freedom.

The entirety of the modern internet is basically built on this fact, and moved so damn fast, yet people will STILL insist "no, to encourage innovation you have to not let people innovate!"

How much did Tim Berners-Lee make off of HTTP?

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Universities are incentivized to research things that will score grant money.

[jampekka]

Grant money is not profit.

[matwood]

Yes, it's more like VC. But, the point is university research is not some magically altruistic thing. It is driven by grants either from the government or someone who made a lot of money.

[jampekka]

University research is labor. Researchers get salary or stipend, usually relatively modest on the ridiculous white collar standards. Nobody gets rich from grants. Typical best case scenario for grant researchers is to stay employed. Tenured faculty don't get any money from the grants.

(Very) few do get rich by leeching publicly funded research for spin-off companies. High level admins can get relatively rich from obscene salaries, but they aren't the ones applying for the grants or doing the research.

Probably not altruistic, but not usually primarily for money either. If money is what you want, university is a very bad place for trying to get it. People do do things for other reasons than economic gain regardless of what the prevailing economics dogma and ideology claims.

[badwolf]

Not directly, but if it can save a university from having to use their endowment or other funds for something they would probably already do anyway, is there fundamentally a difference?

[jampekka]

Nobody gets access to the money privately. The grant is paid out in salaries for work instead of capital gains. There's no capital investment for the grant.

Of course grants are an economic incentive to do something. But not all economic incentives are profit.

Edit: To be clear, universities as such don't generally apply for research grants. Researchers in universities do, and for getting a grant they get the luxury of working for a salary for a few years, or getting somebody else to be paid for their work. Universities do take a cut (overheads) from the grants to nominally pay for infra and admin etc, but in reality a lot of it is spent on all kinds of non-related things like teaching and alumni dinners and chauffeurs for the provost.

[bartonfink]

The existence of one incentive does not preclude other relevant incentives, for fuck's sake.

[melagonster]

unfortunately, drug designing is special condition here. the experiment of drugs spend cray amounts of money.

[jampekka]

Military costs crazy amounts of money. Education and healthcare cost crazy amounts. And roads, public transport, water and sewage, social security, basic research, space programs, police, governance, firefighting etc.

[yareal]

You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine? Especially if that research focused not on "what's the most profitable medicine" but rather "what medicine would increase well being the most"?

You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?

[jandrewrogers]

Government investment in biomedical research has a history of following political fashion rather than optimizing for the best outcomes. Diseases that a politician cannot talk about in a press conference don’t get funded. The rise of private foundations funding a large percentage of all biomedical research was a response to government, and sometimes companies, reliably ignoring major medical research areas.

[jampekka]

[citation needed]

Research funding is allocated mostly by the academic community itself, via panels consisting of academics. This does have problems of its own, but they have little to do with politics as in elected politicians. Policians can have some influence on general directions, but it's quite limited.

What you say sounds very much based on the general anti-government and anti-democratic ideology rather than evaluation of history.

[jandrewrogers]

I am familiar with the history. The problematic gaps in medical research are well-known even within the government communities with budget for biomedical research. Ironically, the US military has ended up funding, despite their more limited budget and no real mandate, basic medical research into common non-military diseases like multiple sclerosis that NIH/NSF ignore but have obvious ROI for reducing population-scale medical costs (which affects the military but is outside the scope of its mission). Similarly, the rise of privately funded foundations to fill persistent odd gaps in government-funded biomedical research are well-documented.

The large increase in non-traditional funding orgs for biomedical research over the last several decades has been driven by a widespread perception that the traditional government funding has been increasingly captured by a academic cliques with low ROI priorities.

I've worked in government science orgs, the capture of funding control by ideological academic cliques is very common. It has unfortunately infested the biomedical research funding, which reduces realized ROI from the money allocated to those orgs. In the US government, some of the best medical R&D ROI dollar-for-dollar right now is found in the military, but that really shouldn't be their job outside of traditional areas like trauma medicine.

[kloop]

> You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine?

Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.

Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)

[jampekka]

Nobody should get or have 1 billion dollars. Not even close. I've fundamentally soured on that.

But even that would be better than the current system where people that have nothing to do with the research get obscene amounts of money solely on the merit of having obscene amounts of money.

[jampekka]

You probably do put quite a chunk of your taxes to fund research in the medicine, and pharma profits on top. Especially outside US drugs are typically bought with public funds. With the privatized drug development model we just get extra middlemen leeching off profits.

[lordnacho]

The drugs business is hard to use an an example, because it's precisely because things are covered by patents that it is worth spending a lot of money on. Not only that, regulation by the FDA and similar entities can be expensive because there are large businesses that can pay for the expense, because they were awarded a monopoly in the past for other drugs.

It's the snake that eats itself.