Re:The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight
by JunkDNA on Monday March 20, 2017 @07:04AM
(#13913122)
Pharmaceuticals are a great example. The actual chemical compounds are mostly trivial to manufacture. This is the central reason generic drugs are so cheap. Once you know a particular chemical is useful as a drug and someone else has done the legwork of proving it to regulators, copying that drug is simple and cheap.
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Re:The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight
by jononor on Monday March 20, 2017 @08:58AM
(#13913711)
The R&D process for pharmaceuticals is long, hard and expensive because it needs to pass regulations. And it kinda needs to be like that to keep the safety of people. But most areas of invention are not like that, there are no such strict regulations, or the need for them.
So an idea would be to remove patents as a general invention-protecting mechanism, and replace it with a protection tailored specific to the regulations that cause the problem to be so significant, like in pharmaceuticals. Maybe the FDA could even administer/enforce it.