Bringing back the Somali shilling

Re:Bringing back the Somali shilling by semi-extrinsic on Thursday May 25, 2017 @05:38AM (#14416228)

I agree. But the flipside is that without patents, no-one would be spending money on drug development, since there would be 100% probability that someone straight-up copies your drug that you spent 5 years and $50 million to develop, and can then sell profitably at a lower price and capture the market.

I think we can all agree that drug patents in particular are a necessary evil. On other patents (in particular software) I'm a lot more skeptical. And that's not to say "Big Pharma" isn't trying to abuse the system to maximise their profits.

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Re:Bringing back the Somali shilling by tom_mellior on Thursday May 25, 2017 @06:02AM (#14416311)

Necessary evil: yes, to some extent. I didn't say "get rid of all patents", just that they can cause market failures.

I could imagine some models to make them less evil, for example by having a scheme that forces companies to grant fairly priced licenses to their competitors. Or, for drugs whose availability is in society's general interest, a government reimbursing the development costs. For both of these one would need a fair way of determining development costs, but as far as I understand pharma research already has a detailed paper trail to make sure their patent applications are bullet-proof.

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