Well, why did anyone - before patents - invent anything? :) Fame, recognition, reputation, furthering the king's glory, and of course mad pussy (or whatever the correct terminus technicus is nowadays).
And as I (hopefully) implied before, it's good that we worked out a social contract that incentivizes these things (that we think are the cornerstones of the progress we want/need), but it seems there's quite a lot more work to be done on this, because it was very crude before, and now it's just ridiculously blunt.
And it's a hard problem, I don't want to say that most people today only really get the downsides (higher medicine prices), because the whole drug discovery and push to market pipeline is horribly inefficient, eats money like there's no tomorrow, and it's not just patents. The FDA can grant ~3 years of exclusivity with the marketing authorization, right?
But. We see that patents are already not good enough for medicine. (Or that the busy little lobby beavers built a huge fucking dam around the patent moat. Just to be sure.)
And as I (hopefully) implied before, it's good that we worked out a social contract that incentivizes these things (that we think are the cornerstones of the progress we want/need), but it seems there's quite a lot more work to be done on this, because it was very crude before, and now it's just ridiculously blunt.
And it's a hard problem, I don't want to say that most people today only really get the downsides (higher medicine prices), because the whole drug discovery and push to market pipeline is horribly inefficient, eats money like there's no tomorrow, and it's not just patents. The FDA can grant ~3 years of exclusivity with the marketing authorization, right?
But. We see that patents are already not good enough for medicine. (Or that the busy little lobby beavers built a huge fucking dam around the patent moat. Just to be sure.)