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RE: Ideas are nothing, execution is everything: a perspective on patents
I'm against patents generally speaking, however I wanna do the devil's advocate.
There are products easy to replicate (simple or cost effective recipe / procedure / reverse engineering) but they can cost a lot in R&D. Without patents, who wanna spend millions in R&D without guarantees of making money on these products?
This makes me think maybe the problem it's patents legislations, more than patents.
That is a special case. Majority of inventions aren't anything like that. I'm guessing most of inventions in that category are drugs. Development of them would be mostly done by open source collaboration, patient groups either developing those themselves or paying for other people to do them.
Yes I was thinking about drugs. Could be solved by increasing number of investors as you say, but it's not that easy.
I think it would be a lot easier. Currently, drug companies are mostly interested in profits. That isn't always the same thing as patient getting healthier. Patents are used to prevent competition and better drugs, so the patients have to use expensive and not optimal drugs.
If the drug development were done by patient demand, they could try several different types of drugs at the same time, even when still in the development phase. The feedback would be much faster.
Because the drug development is expensive, other opportunities would be explored more seriously, too, like diet. If patients have to pay everything themselves, they want the most cost effective treatment. It's not necessarily a drug, but the current system pretty much forces everybody to use drugs because patents make them so profitable.
I would agree with you completely about it being a problem with legislation over the restriction of patents. I support voluntary restrictions, but our current system is completely anathema to innovative and open cooperation and competition.
Open source communities and concepts solve this everyday. With today's technologies in collaboration and crowd sourcing/ funding, we can do it all, if we want.