"As of right now there is very little in the way of evidence that patents in anyway contribute to encouraging people to produce."
There are untold exception to this - It's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Drug Patents, in particular, are incredibly important. Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it?
Remember - Patents are good for only a short period of time, under twenty years in most countries, and after that it's a free for all - anyone can use the process's and systems that were shared and documented.
With all that said - 90% of the software patents really are nothing more than crap - usually consisting of an engineer having an idea that most of their "skilled and educated in the arts" peers could have come up with in less than a week's worth of work and discussion. Public-Key cryptography class patents are few and far between.
If you check out their data from 2006-2008, they spend about 16% of revenue on R&D. They spend about the same on marketing, though in 2007 they spent 23%, which drags the amount up a bit. But...
They spend 30% on SI&A, which stands for "Selling, Information, and Administrative" purposes. This includes "Direct selling expenses are expenses that can be directly linked to the sale of a specific unit such as credit, warranty and advertising expenses. Indirect selling expenses are expenses which cannot be directly linked to the sale of a specific unit, but which are proportionally allocated to all units sold during a certain period, such as telephone, interest and postal charges. General and administrative expenses include salaries of non-sales personnel, rent, heat and lights."
So, you can't _really_ be sure of what they're spending on selling, because it's mixed in with non-sales personell... but bottom line is, they don't spend that much on R&D, not compared with what they're making, anyway.
And they wouldn't have an incentive, but I'd argue that they _shouldn't_. Something as important as drugs should really be one of the legitimate functions of government. If I ran things, I'd be throwing out patents, but turning up NSF funding.
Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it?
Patents, and Supplementary Protection Certs (SPC) which extend drug patents to 25 yrs in the UK IIRC, are temporary.
Also it's always worth remembering that drug companies spend vastly more (3 times, might even be 4) on marketing than on producing drugs and make humongous profits.
Somewhat hypothetical, but: how difficult is it to reverse-engineer a drug's exact composition with only the final product (the pill/vaccine/etc. itself)? If it's difficult enough to be economically infeasible, then patent protection here could be replaced by simply keeping the drug a secret.
Of course, that kills the generics market, and I suspect it's not such a difficult problem to RE a drug, but... just curious.
They have to disclose the contents to be licensed for medical purposes.
My wife did a stint as a student with AstraZeneca (global pharma corp) they were making "new" drugs. One thing they do is take an existing drug and try swapping out different parts for functionally equivalent parts and run tests to see if the drug is effective enough to warrant proper trials and check to see if it circumvents the opposition patents.
Agreed, I do recognize that patenting physical things has benefits. My earlier post was with respect to software patents only. I'm against patents and copyright for ethical reasons, but software patents have no excuse for existing.
There are untold exception to this - It's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Drug Patents, in particular, are incredibly important. Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it?
Remember - Patents are good for only a short period of time, under twenty years in most countries, and after that it's a free for all - anyone can use the process's and systems that were shared and documented.
With all that said - 90% of the software patents really are nothing more than crap - usually consisting of an engineer having an idea that most of their "skilled and educated in the arts" peers could have come up with in less than a week's worth of work and discussion. Public-Key cryptography class patents are few and far between.