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A comment on Paypal Patent Application: Expedited Virtual Currency Transaction System. Parent comment

Re:Paypal Patent Application: Expedited Virtual Currency Tra... by mayneack on Monday March 05, 2018 @07:58PM (#16526032)
5 minutes of googling suggests that Penicillin was not patented and the mass production was later patented by the USDA (not some private pharma company). The entire modern funding ecosystem being patent based just means it's the most profitable business model, not that it's the only way to produce pharmaceuticals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2442141

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Re:Paypal Patent Application: Expedited Virtual Currency Tra... by jjeaff on Monday March 05, 2018 @08:50PM (#16526277)
Some drugs likely would be discovered through non profit efforts. But it seems reasonable to believe that we would be quite a bit farther behind overall without the profit motive.
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Re:Paypal Patent Application: Expedited Virtual Currency Tra... by ggg9990 on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @01:10AM (#16527208)
Of course it’s not the only way to produce pharmaceuticals, as pharmaceuticals are thousands of years old. But without patents the number of new drugs pharmaceuticals over the last 50 years would be probably 1-5% of it actually was.
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Re:Paypal Patent Application: Expedited Virtual Currency Tra... by tobltobs on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @02:58AM (#16527556)
Maybe we would have less but better pharmaceuticals, because it would be easier to improve the existing ones.
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