While it's certainly bad for companies to exploit the patent system and try to extort profit out of sick and dying people, that does not justify throwing out the protection altogether.

If we threw out the patent system, none of the drug companies would spend the millions of dollars required to create things like a cure for AIDS as they would not make that money back because the next guy would just do some simple chromatography and have the same chemical compound synthesized for a fraction of the cost. What company is going to go tens of millions of dollars in debt with no hope of making that money back? When the incentive to do research is gone, we have no AIDS cure at all and in my opinion a world with no AIDS cure is worse than a world with an AIDS cure that's a bit expensive.

There are many things that are broken with the patent system for sure, but throwing it out completely would cause many things to fall apart and cause catastrophic damage.

Rather, it's the researchers who went looking for them who should be granted any patent rights. They're the ones who could work harder to produce better results and can have their performance improved with more rewards like a patent's monopoly.

> There will be individual cases where it's not true

I feel like we agree.

Side note as to drug development: if we assume patents are a way to subsidize research into an area felt to be socially beneficial, it shouldn't be too surprising when multiple people go for (relatively) low-hanging, or particularly desirable, fruit, and sometimes get there simultaneously. But in that model we still needed the subsidy to get out of the system state where zero people were doing such research. It doesn't necessarily make sense to turn around and say that we're going to take away patents when too many people discover the same thing at once -- if the patent system was necessary to get the research done at all, scrapping it will scrap the research too. Refusing to grant patents out of obviousness isn't the same concept as refusing to grant them in an effort to avoid wasteful research effort collisions.

Patents are supposed to be beneficial to society because they give incentive to the inventor to invent. But inventors inventing stuff doesn't seem to be a problem in computer technologies. We don't need these useless patents.

Maybe, but I'd argue that the problem was granting IP rights too strong in the first place. Patents are, in principle, a useful incentive for R&D, but when the products of that R&D are medical in nature, the ethics of allowing them to be withheld become very shaky. In particular, granting patents that allow R&D organisations to recover the true overall cost of their work and make a sufficient profit to justify the endeavour is one thing, but granting patents that allow monopoly providers to set arbitrarily high costs on essential treatments is another thing entirely.

And before anyone suggests that there is no alternative to keep that research going, consider that typically it is not actually the researchers who are raking in those big profits. It is entirely possible that a centrally funded public research service that hired the same experts and provided the same labs and then used its own or external manufacturing facilities for mass production would work out more cost effective for a centralised healthcare system than the current way things work particularly in the US.

The trade is: we give you a monopoly on the thing, you give us (the public) written step-by-step instructions on how to create that thing.

If instructions aren't necessary to create it — i.e. I can figure it out from just seeing it — then the deal is broken, and isn't serving public good any more.

They're getting their monopoly, what did we get? Zilch.

This is the problem with patent protection in our industry. We can recreate things pretty easily. In say, biotech, it's much harder to figure out.

I'm still behind just scrapping patents altogether though. It's adding process for process' sake. The same feeling you get when you have big section of unnecessary code, and ripping it out has a no effect on the result — patents feel like that chunk of code, before you rip it out. They seem like another area where people have created work for themselves effectively doing or creating nothing. If we got rid of them, not a lot would change, but millions of people would instantly have less weight on their brain.

Don't mind patent terms on inventions that are non-essential, but we need to treat medicines differently. The public needs to recognize that IP protection is a gift we give authors to make their authorship more feasible, and that they cannot hold the life and health of either the populace or the culture hostage for their exclusive profitability.

It's like imagine a guy has a nice idea to cure cancer, but plays the princess with it and refuses to industrialize it, while people are dying left and right. Surely, it becomes indefensible, and at some point, someone brave will do the right thing and implement the idea. You have a right to reap the benefit of your ideas but you have a duty not to deprive humanity of any benefit just because you thought of it first, I feel ?

Patents are morally reprehensible. If society is going to have some vaguely patent-like thing, it's going to have to be radically different from what we think of when we think of patents, something far more modest than this insane binding of other people's thoughts for the sake of the childish whine: "but I thought of it first!"

Patent law is there, because creating original work is costly and can take years in engineering and scientific fields. The patents are there to give a time-window for the people who made the investments to make their money back and get some return on their investment.

That is not morally right. It also isn't the intent of patents, because it does absolutely nothing to further the progress of the useful arts and sciences.

It wasn't clear from my post, but patents are obviously important, just not to protect everybody's random ideas.

That is why it so important to make the point about the investment. In the pharmaceutical industry (and others) there is upfront cost and that should be encouraged and subsequently protected for some time.

I still have some philosophical reservations about patenting facts i.e. "this gene does that"; yet I think that is not avoidable.

The "Is society as a whole served" question, to me is the paramount criterion. How to establish that for a particular invention, I do not know.