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.”
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.