In a way this seems like the discussion about whether to eliminate patents for cancer drugs or other drugs for lethal diseases (like it happened in India), and therefore decrease the price of such drugs by 10-1000x, and help maybe tens of millions of people, or allow companies (foreign companies even) to keep charging whatever they want, and also have a monopoly on that type of drug.
One of the interesting factoids I came across a while ago was the assertion that 85-90% of pharmaceutical companies' expenses were marketing. Perhaps if they didn't spend so much on marketing, they wouldn't need to have patents for so long or charge so much?
