The initial idea had some merit but the implementation is terrible and most countries had no choice and had to implement the US copyright and related laws.

This is a naive thinking. Advances in software industry are purely intellectual so it doesn't involve heavy cost, which is why open source idea can work and be argued that it promotes innovation. Say you are a pharmaceutical company developing a new drug, investing billions of dollars. If there is no IP, why do it? You need to wake up to reality.

You could pay researchers with money from taxes, then you will get more research into important problems and less into rich people concerns like baldness and beauty creams.

Mathematicians,physicists also do a lot of research and they do not ask you to pay them to use their findings.

You seem to confuse between basic science and applied science. What you are saying is government should direct resources to every research. Basically saying that planned economy is better off than market economy. I wouldn't say market economy is a complete solution but time and again it has been proven to work better than planned economy. And also, why do you look down on applications? They are what actually make people's life better.

>What you are saying is government should direct resources to every research

Yea, this sounds like an awesome idea. Let's do it.

What I do not like is the idea that medical research is directed into what makes more money, I would be ok if this happens with beauty products but not with critical medicine.

Say you find a cure for X, how will you price it as a company? You put some variables into an equation and attempt to get the maximum profit not the maximum health for the society. This could mean letting poor people to die or suffer without a cure.

> Mathematicians,physicists also do a lot of research and they do not ask you to pay them to use their findings.

What? of course they do. The moment a physical reaction or process is applied to industry, you can bet someone will file a patent.

At engineering school, it is common for professors, students, etc, to patent technology they invent. Colleges have entire departments.

... which is an unfortunate example of privatization of a public good. The public pays for research, and an individual captures the profits.

Not all research is publicly funded. Historically speaking, most of it was not, until relatively recently. I don't disagree that publicly funded research should be public, but I think applying that universally to say that all patents are evil is rather strong and leaves no room for private investment.

"Relatively recently" here means pre-WWII. Basic research has been heavily reliant on government funding for decades. Before that, basic research was on a much smaller scale.

Central economic planning doesn't have an especially good track record. While one could certainly argue that market economies put a lot of resources into things that aren't important or good for the world, they've done better over the past 100 years at not having people starving to death.

The historical example is not such a clear because there are other variables like wars that caused large destruction and countries that lost the war had to pay damages.

What I am thinking is this, the smart people that want to become scientists do not do it to make money for some company, they do it for passion and help people in the case of people that learned to become doctors and research medical treatments. You need a system that finds this smart people when they graduate and place them in research institution paid by the public. You can have private companies research other stuff but don't put all the core research into private companies that are motivated of making profit. You have for example the military founded by tons of money that some of them go into research, my suggestion is have health research similarly prioritized as the military. You could even pay private research institution but when you pay for research all the results get put in the public domain.

That's big news to major American companies like Amazon and Walmart that have completely embraced central planning.

We may not be talking about the same thing. I'm referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

Companies don't develop new drugs, they have no incentives to invest into research when it's vastly more profitable to just increase the price of old drugs, patent drugs someone else developed, pay doctors to promote their drugs, etc. Most of the actual medical research is funded by taxes.

Please read into the drug development process and clinical trials. You might be rather surprised.

This is far too big an issue to get into in this very limited forum, but suffice it to say the question is not as cut and dry as you appear to think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright

It really is. Hoarding knowledge is harmful to humanity as a whole. Period.

That's just utter nonsense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY

I think it's a fine idea, but qualifying for protection and the exclusivity terms are maybe out of touch with reality.

Software patents in particular shouldn't get 20 years. That made sense in general in the 19th century; it's an eternity today for software. Similarly, the extra exclusivity opportunities drugmakers have (mashups, etc) may be too friendly now.