480 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 20 Feb \ on: Strong arguments against patents libertarian
The book Against Intellectual Monopolies demonstrates that patents, and other IP, do not live up to any of the claims about how valuable they are to society.
In short, empirical studies routinely fail to find any evidence that patents benefit research.
I recommend looking into the work of Stephen Kinsella, if you're interested in this topic. He's a practicing patent attorney and has hundreds of talks, interviews, and essays outlining the position you're looking for.
Idk, I don’t want to advocate for pharma companies, but the fact is that they (some) do spend a ton of money on R&D. Assuming, newly made drugs are not patent protected and every other company can benefit from producing drugs right after the drugs are discovered, I can’t really imagine who would do that. Another thing is whether the drugs, once in the market, need to be expensive as hell. And I guess, this is true for many other industries.
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There's a lot going on there, but part of the expense is that they have to rush to develop the drug first, otherwise they get nothing for their investment.
Economically speaking, the patent system creates an all-pay auction. I recall from some of my undergrad coursework that this type of auction often generates enormous losses when put in practice.
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