Re:Just Enough Piracy Can Be a Good Thing
by raven105x on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @11:26AM
(#20810586)
If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something, and we'd go back to the dark ages. Ideologies must be evaluated on what they functionally incentivize in a society - and this proposition makes R&D investment equivalent to financial suicide.
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Abolishing patents is radical enough to begin with, so why stop there? If everyone had UBI and free healthcare to cover the material costs of living, is it really so implausible that people who were interested in looking for apples that cured something would do so?
That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.
Re:Just Enough Piracy Can Be a Good Thing
by username90 on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @02:27PM
(#20812922)
> If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something
This can be solved by government grants, a high but still normal VAT on all medicine purchases is enough to cover all our current medicine research costs, you'd just have to earmark it.