Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
If it’s state funded then that’s obviously a different matter.
But usually it’s a company making drugs, and they’d go bust if they spent billions developing a drug and got zero money back. Then there would be far fewer drugs made.
Be practical. Letting people die for ideological reasons is not a good thing.
I wrote a long winded reply but honestly I’ll just say that your second paragraph is entirely based on fiction and your final paragraph is precisely what for profit medicine is designed to do. Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist. The post office does not need to make money. It exists because we HAVE to have it.
You can go see for yourself. Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine. They do not and should not have the right to deny anyone the right to produce it as cheaply as necessary to provide it to their populations. I can go deeper if you want but if this doesn’t show you that we are saying the same thing I’m going to have doubts about this being in good faith.
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
Im saying that the companies who currently own the IP didn’t in fact pay for the development. They paid for the exclusive rights. Universities discovered and developed the new drugs, and then, since universities don’t run large pharmaceutical factories, they sell that developed drug to a company to manufacture it at scale in exchange for the sole rights to be the manufacturer. The system as it stands is not like taxes, because taxes are FOR something. If we stopped giving patents to Pfizer we wouldn’t stop having medicine or even stop having new medical breakthroughs, we would simply no longer have to pay $600 for a Tylenol in the hospital.
I’m glad you added that you aren’t advocating for this, but this system isn’t ingrained into society. It was created, and shaped this way by the companies which own the ip and benefit from nobody being able to manufacture their own cheaper versions. The result of dismantling the medical ip system would not result in zero medicine being manufactured it would result in hundreds of thousands of individual small pharmacies producing their own drugs for nearly no cost. The IP rights exist to protect entrenched capital at the very top of the market. This does not protect anyone but the rights holders and hurts everyone else by further increasing the barriers to access for the majority of the planet.
A billion dollar company has convinced you that if they don’t hold exclusive rights to manufacture lifesaving medications they did not develop then all of medical research would cease. That is hilariously false.
You’re talking about a very different situation to the one I am talking about. I never advocated for companies buying up exclusivity deals, particularly not when the development was done by publicly-owned institutions. I’m not sure where you got that from, because it sure as shit wasn’t from anything I wrote.
How, when more companies would be able to develop the same drug? And they don’t develop drugs, they develop ways to extend their patents.
More companies will develop that drug.
But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.
You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.
After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.
But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.
One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?
I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.
In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.
It is the world we should live in though. And it’s the one we should be advocating for instead of justifying the current system that privatizes profits of lifesaving medications and vaccines over making them widely available at the lowest possible cost to society and consumers.
We can get to the point you’re talking to in your last paragraph, we just have to stop letting the people who benefit from the current system demand the conversation be centered around the impact it has on them. You and I sure as fuck don’t benefit from patents. We would benefit from open source medicine. I don’t really care if nobody is able to maintain a billion dollar company based off withholding and silo-ing information.
I agree it’s the world we should live in. But it’s not exactly realistic. And I’d rather discuss ways we can make our lives materially better as opposed to self-flagellation over a perfect solution while mocking anybody who proposes an imperfect but better-than-status-quo solution.
There is so many people letting perfect be the enemy of good on Lemmy.