Necessity is the mother of invention.

Your company maybe won't spend a billion dollars on this research.

Maybe some govt funded research will work out, maybe a dozen other people will run into the discovery at some point.

A large majority of inventions by humans haven't been motivated by profit.

> A large majority of inventions by humans haven't been motivated by profit.

Were the large majority of drugs we use today (the topic discussed) invented outside the profit motive? I don't know the answer to that.

this paper is not about drugs. Those patents already do have to disclose their formulas.

I think you're pasting this here without regard for context.

"Were the large majority of drugs we use today (the topic discussed) invented outside the profit motive? I don't know the answer to that."

is the context.

Does your comment answer my question?

On further reflection, I see your point: the "context" was drug patents & their necessity, or lack of it, for drug development.

You have to admit that that is, itself, out of context for the original post, which is strictly about software patents. But yeah, at that point it had morphed into something else.

Fair enough, it's only tangentially related. I was more interested in replying to what the other person said.

Yes, at least the base versions of the drugs were.

We use teeny tiny variations of the drugs which are supposedly more effective but are also much more expensive.

Most other countries report significantly better healthcare outcomes with generic drugs.

Drug discovery is the easy part. Many of the molecules come out of publicly funded academic research. The hard, expensive part is running the large-scale human trials necessary to demonstrate the level of safety and efficacy needed for FDA approval. There is no way to do that cheaply. That's why patents are needed as an economic incentive.

In theory the government could nationalize the entire pharmaceutical industry but there is no evidence that bureaucrats are capable of reliably picking the right candidate drugs. Countries with weak IP protections do relatively little new drug development.

> but there is no evidence that bureaucrats are capable of reliably picking the right candidate drugs

I'm not convinced that the govt bureaucrats would do a worse job than drug co bureaucrats. Current studies are poorly designed, implemented incorrectly, results are cherry-picked and gamed, p-hacking lives, ... This is an industry that can't even seem to accept pre-registration.

Also, as you say, most of these molecules come from publicly funded research. Why would the group funding the first set of research (and producing more molecules than industry) automatically be bad at the second?

In all, I'm not convinced that "Drug discovery is the easy part." If it was so easy, then why don't drug co's do it, and save the licensing fees?

> If it was so easy, then why don't drug co's do it, and save the licensing fees?

Because licensing costs less and is risk-reduced?

> Why would the group funding the first set of research (and producing more molecules than industry) automatically be bad at the second?

People have different motivations and talents. Woz is a great computer engineer and Jobs was a great salesman. One without the other wouldn't have given us ubiquitous personal computers.

Same thing applies to organizations.

this paper is not about drugs. Those patents already do have to disclose their formulas.

> If I'm a pharmaceutical company

you already had to disclose the chemical formula for your drug. This paper only applies to software.

AFAIK, most empirical studies don't show any benefit of patents for innovation

I'm not sure specifically about pharmaceutical companies, though. They may be an exception.

I'd love to see who they picked for the control group

Imagine if Jonas Salk said the same thing.

Umm because medicine is supposed to be about helping other people? Why would people spend billions of dollars trying to help others work through a natural disaster?

To me that's one of the worst things about modern pharmaceutical companies, they care more about making money than actually helping people.

It's not like the "make money" part is superfluous, though. You need it for research.