You would simultaneously be making a fortune, while at the same time being called a hero.
I’m saying corporations are abusing our common inheritance by plundering the commons and not contributing back to it.
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. “
— Aaron Swartz
Big Pharma is standing on the shoulders of giants, but are biting the hand that fed them.
We have much shared wealth, but without open or public access, and cooperative business models that steward and keep a healthy commons alive, the trend towards extortion of the lower and middle classes of America by Corporations (through rent from IP) will keep increasing, as well as US brutality towards the Global South, in trying to upkeep the US-led Global North Imperial IP regime [1].
In that future, the class divide will keep growing and many more people will continue to suffer.
In the end, without sharing and socializing progress, we run the risk of the Precariat taking down the systems completely, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I believe our ideal future lies in something described as Protocol Cooperativism, using distributed technologies like Ceptr and Holochain.
I would also like to see an unenclosed p2p intellectual property system that honors authorship, yet allows access for all [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/76166b6a-03ca-11e2-9322-00144feab... or https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/GENPRESS/F...
There is so much wrong with that sentence, but it's written with such conviction and confidence that I think this reply is probably a waste of my time.
There is a huge amount of work, money and risk between government funded research highlighting a potential mechanism of action and actually getting a drug to patients. You can easily spend millions and years of work chasing down a promising project only to find out your drug doesn't work. Biology is really complex, most lay-people probably overestimate how much we actually understand. You can work decades in a pharmaceutical company and never see a project you worked on reach clinical trials, and even if you are lucky enough to get that far, it it has about a 10% chance of actually being approved.
To say all that pharmaceutical companies are doing is stealing and monetizing government research is demonstrating a real lack of understanding of how drug discovery works.
Source: worked in drug discovery for many years in both government funded academic labs and pharma.