> Except the corporation or inventor(s) making money off of it, I can't think of anything significant.
But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc. But, it's not nearly enough to justify a patent system that allows you to patent absolutely obvious bullshit then turn around and sue everyone. And, it doesn't justify our copyright system either, with insane terms which span centuries.
So I would agree that it's an open question whether the way we do intellectual property now is better than absolutely nothing i.e. everything publicly known is automatically public domain. I suspect we'd be better off with no patents and no copyright, than with what we have now. But intellectual property in theory and properly implemented, is unquestionably a fine idea, and obviously far superior both to the shit show we have now, and also to a Wild West approach.
Anyway, it's not like you need patents to gouge patients cf epipen, insulin, where patents ran out decades ago and yet, strangely, stuff that costs a few dollars to actually make, is priced in the hundreds of dollars.
> But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc.
No, certainly not. Guaranteeing corporate profits are never a justifiable reason to restrict freedom of information so severely.
You do not need a patent on plastic forks to make money selling them. If there is demand, the floating price will be above the price of manufacture, and the economy is incentivized to meet that demand. If drug recipes were not patented, and there was demand for a drug, once the profit overcomes opportunity cost everyone in industry has incentive to start meeting the demand.
Plenty of arguments exist in this thread why you do not need private for-profit research to discover medicine - and why in many ways having such a system is counter-productive in the first place (the industry consistently refuses to consider anything as a product they cannot patent - and will actively harm people by not selling products they know work but that they cannot guarantee long-term monopoly on).
Yes, certainly. And OP said corporation or inventor.
As long as we're doing capitalism, we ought to have a way for people to make a living off of knowledge work and the arts. Not selling physical artifacts of knowledge work, or making some sort of other derivative income off of it, but profiting directly from the generation and POC of good ideas. It is a system that served us well for one hundred years or more before being hijacked by a pack of ruthless jackals - I probably agree that if we can't fix it it's better to tear it down, but we should still try to fix it.
But, that alone is significant enough to justify most intellectual property: patents, copyright, etc. But, it's not nearly enough to justify a patent system that allows you to patent absolutely obvious bullshit then turn around and sue everyone. And, it doesn't justify our copyright system either, with insane terms which span centuries.
So I would agree that it's an open question whether the way we do intellectual property now is better than absolutely nothing i.e. everything publicly known is automatically public domain. I suspect we'd be better off with no patents and no copyright, than with what we have now. But intellectual property in theory and properly implemented, is unquestionably a fine idea, and obviously far superior both to the shit show we have now, and also to a Wild West approach.
Anyway, it's not like you need patents to gouge patients cf epipen, insulin, where patents ran out decades ago and yet, strangely, stuff that costs a few dollars to actually make, is priced in the hundreds of dollars.