[mbell]

Who said you have to release your method? If what you found through 'R&D' can be quickly reproduced through reverse engineering it's highly unlikely it was complex to figure out. On the other hand if your development is complex, and requires a great deal of time and effort to reverse engineer then your R&D has paid for itself by giving you a dramatic lead in time to market. If a company can't win the market with such a lead they don't really deserve protection. Lets also not forget copyright still exists to protect exact copies of the ultimate product.

[SoftwareMaven]

Drugs are very easy to reverse engineer and it would kind of defeat the point if you created them and then didn't release them.

You have drugs at one end of the spectrum and software and business processes at the other. There is a huge cost associated with medical research due to the inherit complexity of the human body and the requirements governments put on proper testing. Any patent solution has to address that problem as well.

(And, yes, drug companies are doing a horrible job at doing real research, but that doesn't alter the substance of the argument.)

[moultano]

Fine. Make patents a side effect of the FDA's requirements rather than infecting every other industry with it as well.