intellectual property is the only way innovation can happen under capitalism, which is hilarious to me considering how much they like to drum up the great innovativeness of capitalism
Is IP necessary? As others have pointed out, there are countries which thrive on thwarting intellectual property and drive down consumer price (one might argue this is actually more effective capitalism).
To be fair, I think within certain fields the price to develop something, such as a drug, warrants the need for either alternative financing (treating it more like infrastructure than pure capitalism) or some kind of intellectual property law because the development is complicated but easy to reproduce once it’s figured out, but I would challenge the idea that it’s necessary - what real data do we have that supports this claim? Sure, it reduces the number of individuals willing to develop new products when these products are very expensive to develop, but we see new companies being started all the time with new products. I’m not so certain that most fields couldn’t continue to work just as effectively without the same level of modern intellectual property law.
However, I am also willing to admit that we don’t have enough data to know that the opposite is true either. There’s plenty of fields with a LOT of trade secrets - processor development being a good example of something that has a huge cost associated with technological advancement… would these fields advance at the same pace absent strong IP law? It also begs the question - do they exist the way they do because IP law isn’t strong enough? No one is out there making knockoff copies of apple or intel processors, indicating that the trade secrets might be additional protection that capitalism is spontaneously generating in order to make the investment work. There’s a decent amount of unknowns.
I think it’s important to talk about copyright (primarily creative works) and patents (generally an invention or process) separately.
When it comes to things like drug patents, consider this-- what if you couldn’t patent a molecule, or even a chemical process to produce that molecule? How could a drug company profit, and how could they recoup their r&d investment? The same as any other type of patent really, the numbers are just bigger. There is value in expertise and experience. This would move the competitional market to being good at finding useful molecules and being good at creating manufacturing processes.
But wait, isn’t that what drug companies do now? And if everything is freely copyable then where’s the money? No, it’s actually not what they do now. They make money selling the molecules they produce. They don’t make money being good at anything, being good at those things just makes it more likely they will make a bigger profit margin and more likely they will sell more units. But ultimately that comes down to trust and prestige, things you don’t need patents for.
Instead, the drug companies can solicit patronage. Organizations that are motivated to look for cures and therapies for particular disease will actually have somewhere to put their money: with the company that’s got a track record of finding useful molecules. Organizations or governments that need to produce large numbers will put their money with the companies that have a good manufacturing talent. Much like when governments had drug companies produce the covid vaccine that had already been invented by researchers.
The incentive then becomes to be good at finding cures, and cost efficient at producing them. Instead of being good at selling people something they might not need at a higher price than necessary to produce it. It also allows companies to specialize in one or the other and doesn’t require them to be good at both.
I was going to address processor development too but this is already long and I’m running late to be somewhere, hopefully I’ll get around to it later.
I agree that many of these things should be treated as research and publicly funded rather than IP law and what we have today. I am just doing my best to frame the positives and negatives of the existing system with the current knowledge we have. COVID is a great example for how it could work (albeit the way it played out was still very capitalistic) in a more ideal system where we fund something because it is ultimately good for humanity.
intellectual property is the only way innovation can happen under capitalism, which is hilarious to me considering how much they like to drum up the great innovativeness of capitalism
Societies like China that have lax IP laws are growing faster than societies like the US that have harsh IP laws.
Is IP necessary? As others have pointed out, there are countries which thrive on thwarting intellectual property and drive down consumer price (one might argue this is actually more effective capitalism).
To be fair, I think within certain fields the price to develop something, such as a drug, warrants the need for either alternative financing (treating it more like infrastructure than pure capitalism) or some kind of intellectual property law because the development is complicated but easy to reproduce once it’s figured out, but I would challenge the idea that it’s necessary - what real data do we have that supports this claim? Sure, it reduces the number of individuals willing to develop new products when these products are very expensive to develop, but we see new companies being started all the time with new products. I’m not so certain that most fields couldn’t continue to work just as effectively without the same level of modern intellectual property law.
However, I am also willing to admit that we don’t have enough data to know that the opposite is true either. There’s plenty of fields with a LOT of trade secrets - processor development being a good example of something that has a huge cost associated with technological advancement… would these fields advance at the same pace absent strong IP law? It also begs the question - do they exist the way they do because IP law isn’t strong enough? No one is out there making knockoff copies of apple or intel processors, indicating that the trade secrets might be additional protection that capitalism is spontaneously generating in order to make the investment work. There’s a decent amount of unknowns.
I think it’s important to talk about copyright (primarily creative works) and patents (generally an invention or process) separately.
When it comes to things like drug patents, consider this-- what if you couldn’t patent a molecule, or even a chemical process to produce that molecule? How could a drug company profit, and how could they recoup their r&d investment? The same as any other type of patent really, the numbers are just bigger. There is value in expertise and experience. This would move the competitional market to being good at finding useful molecules and being good at creating manufacturing processes.
But wait, isn’t that what drug companies do now? And if everything is freely copyable then where’s the money? No, it’s actually not what they do now. They make money selling the molecules they produce. They don’t make money being good at anything, being good at those things just makes it more likely they will make a bigger profit margin and more likely they will sell more units. But ultimately that comes down to trust and prestige, things you don’t need patents for.
Instead, the drug companies can solicit patronage. Organizations that are motivated to look for cures and therapies for particular disease will actually have somewhere to put their money: with the company that’s got a track record of finding useful molecules. Organizations or governments that need to produce large numbers will put their money with the companies that have a good manufacturing talent. Much like when governments had drug companies produce the covid vaccine that had already been invented by researchers.
The incentive then becomes to be good at finding cures, and cost efficient at producing them. Instead of being good at selling people something they might not need at a higher price than necessary to produce it. It also allows companies to specialize in one or the other and doesn’t require them to be good at both.
I was going to address processor development too but this is already long and I’m running late to be somewhere, hopefully I’ll get around to it later.
I agree that many of these things should be treated as research and publicly funded rather than IP law and what we have today. I am just doing my best to frame the positives and negatives of the existing system with the current knowledge we have. COVID is a great example for how it could work (albeit the way it played out was still very capitalistic) in a more ideal system where we fund something because it is ultimately good for humanity.