Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch

• conditional_soup@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.

  source
• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.

  And even if they did, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.

  We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.

  source

  • Auntievenim@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.

    I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.

    I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.

    source

    • RedFrank24@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.

      Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.

      source

      • Auntievenim@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        First of all, governments already do fund all the research.

        Even in your hypothetical, thats just one government. It doesn’t stop medical advancement entirely just because one dictatorship stops funding research. It moves elsewhere. When nazi germany declared that nobody would receive funding for anything outside of Aryan research ^tm the scientists just left to a country that wasn’t barbarically stupid.

        Also, everything in your final paragraph is stuff that is happening now, in america, under the capitalist organization of the economy which gives all the rights to a private company after publicly funding the research and development of their drugs. It makes no difference, save the fact that now the authoritarian government in power has consolidated billions of dollars for rich capitalists who will gladly accept the orders to no longer produce those medicines while remaining disgustingly wealthy.

        Even if you believe in the delusional idea that private companies are funding the development of novel treatments entirely on their own the fact remains that drugs are currently, as we speak, not for all people. I am pointing out the solution to that problem, and the response was to point out how, if we did what I said, then what’s already happening now would be the consequence.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

      source

      • griffin@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        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.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
      • Auntievenim@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        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.

        source

        • -> View More Comments