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by sneak 475 days ago
This seems to conveniently ignore how patents work.
1 comments

Working with the most charitable interpretation of your view, is the idea that Peter Higgs would have patentented the Higgs boson, CERN would have paid him royalties to attempt to produce it, and CERN and Higgs together would have sold the rights to a trust that was able to collect royalties on all products whose invention required the use of electroweak theory? It would have to be a patent term that lasted about 100 years, otherwise Maxwell wouldn't have been able to fund Maxwell's laws.
This presupposes that CERN in its current implementation, scale, and efficiency is a net good for society.