Bzzt, wrong. Nationalization tends to give health care to those who would have otherwise died at 40, dropped out of middle school, received *nothing* for their national resources, or consumed dog food in the later years of their life.
What again is wrong with South American oil having high prices? So far as I can tell, it is a 'bad thing' because it means the US of A doesn't get the oil at hugely below market prices due to contracts negotiated with puppet governments. That's the western version of the free market: Everyone else works, we get the benefit, and any change in that status quo is something to complain about on/.
Unless I'm in denial about either China or my intelligence, you're wrong. Care to elaborate on how China is a long-term threat to us? All I have been able to fathom is that they are very likely to overtake the United States economically, largely because they have a more productive populace. But how is that a threat? Is it a threat because they seem to be succeeding economically while their government continues to be relatively free of Washington's influence?
Seriously, the idea that a functioning non-capitalist economy (notwithstanding that China has a somewhat free market) is so offensive as to require total economic isolation and military incursions was something that was fashionable in the 60's. (Cuba anyone?) Don't tell me it's back again.
You will excuse me, I trust, if I remain skeptical of "plausible deniability."
Actually, it's a quite well-established part of cryptography. There's nothing controversial about it. To oversimplify, encrypted something looks the same as encrypted nothing.
As an example (that I'm sure is flawed in ways that will soon be pointed out to me), one partition on my laptop is encrypted. It's about 50 Gb of space. But no one can even be able to tell you how much free space there is - you have no idea how much of it I'm using, nor any practical way of finding out if it's being used at all.
No. The reason to use Free software is not because it is better; the reason to use Free software is because it is free.
That's the theory, at least. I still use the fglrx driver, because it *is* better for my computer (which I purchased in my ignorant pre-FOSS-aware-days). All the same, when I get a new computer, you better believe it's going to have an Intel graphics card, because then I won't have to choose between Free and better.
It's nontrivial, yes, but the advantage is we only have to do it once, and the basis is already laid in the traditions of science (the scientific method, peer review, etc).
On the other hand, right now we have to have an FDA that performs its duty correctly (keep in mind that while the FDA does not do the testing themselves, they do have to know what is involved in this testing, well enough to make sure that the private actors carry out their tests adequately) and a USPTO that does so as well, and heck, neither one seems to be doing such a great job. The point has been made elsewhere in this discussion that the Government doesn't mess everything up, especially when they have scientists driving the process, such as Los Alamos, DARPA, or NASA in the USA, and the plethora of government-funded social services in most other developed Western nations. A transparent process that can be vetted by the public and the research community would be far better than what we have now.
Also, it's worth considering that while there is a private company running the tests, it is in their interests to falsify or otherwise skew both their testing and their patent applications. Thus, the government's current responsibilities are compounded (or in theory, can be compounded, by people who have every reason to do so) by the people they are supposed to be regulating. While letting this be a publicly funded certainly wouldn't remove all incentive for deception, it would remove one of the strongest- the profit motive.
Okay, so the FDA charges obscene amounts for clinical trials. How it that an argument for patents?
If the FDA's approval process for new drugs is broken - fix it. The last thing I would think of is to build yet another government-regulated, easily broken construct to pay for the first government-regulated, definitely broken construct.
Why do people still say this? It's just plain not true.
UNIX is 35-odd years old. It's had bugs for all 35 years. Windows has been around for a much shorter time - indeed, things like file permissions and multi-user access didn't get added until NT (and boy, does it show!). The bugs that XP has now and Vista will have for the next 5 years are the same ones that UNIX ironed out in the 70's and 80's. That's why Linux and OSX are more secure than NT/XP, and why even if more people started using Linux or OSX, they would still have a far lower vulnerability rate than Windows.
I live in the South; I have for 10 years. But even if I live here for fifty, the day will never come when I see a confederate flag without being disgusted, and the day will never come when I don't immediately discount the humanity and civility of those who choose to fly it.
The confederate flag represents the ideology, government, and, yes, "culture" that holds a philosophy of hatred, dehumanization, and slavery. Glorifying that "heritage" is tasteless and idiotic, but most of all, it's offensive.
Dude, I just don't see that. Just put this image in your head: a fully grown warlord with a big old beard, and maybe a turban, and a unibrow you wouldn't believe - holding a lime green laptop and giggling while he sees the picture some other warlord drew for him (it looks a little like a malformed turkey).
Yeah. Okay. And as for terrorists - what are they going to do, make a beowulf cluster of XO laptops?
Okay, this is very much OT, but...
As I see it, advertising is a zero-gain game. You can only increase revenue to your own company by A) drawing it away from the competition or B) getting people to take it out of their savings account. In neither case does advertising actually generate wealth; it simply moves it (at great cost, of course- a very inefficient way of moving money).
There's always the "education" card, eg, "we're not advertising, we're educating the consumers about opportunities afforded to them by our products blah blah blah..." and that this somehow does produce better efficiency and thus wealth within the economy. Well, if it's really just a matter of getting information around to people, than in a society where we had information properly organized and distributed there would be no need for this "educational" advertising; people would know exactly what vendor to go to and who could be trusted for what and what rates would be fair. Thus, any wealth that advertising may generate for society only exists because our categorization of information is imperfect. That is a problem with a solution that does not need advertising.
Ultimately, though, outside of those special cases (and I am skeptical of even those) advertising does not "make" money. People would, ideally, spend exactly what they need to on exactly those products they need to and they'd be unswayed by advertising because they had all the information they needed.
In short, and in an extremely abstract form, advertising is a social solution to a technical problem. Sorry if that doesn't make any sense; it's just something I've had bouncing around for a while.
When you're right, you're right. We live without regard for other people so often that I've become desensitized to it. But hey, at least I feel some guilt for it, however little comfort it may be to those who need help and aren't getting it. I hope that at least keeps me from ever accepting it as "just the way it is."
I think we all have become desensitized to the fact that people die unnecessarily while we watch soap operas (and post on/.), and there's no real way to rationalize it, beyond saying "I just don't care," which doesn't seem very nice, does it?
But not to get too heavy (or maybe we should?) - the issue remains that the best way to benefit from selling an artificially limited resource (for example, patented medicines) is to keep it scarce. And with medicines, it is indeed people's lives that are being manipulated.
Maybe we can draw a distinction, because I'm not selling the food that people are dying for lack of, nor am I making an effort to keep it scarce for my own personal gain. No, I don't think that's a valid rationalization.
Actually, it's my belief that those diseases are where no free-market system can work. There will simply never be an economic incentive to deal with rare diseases, only a moral and social one. That's something for universities, charities and governments. Businesses *should* do what's good business, and performing expensive research on diseases that affect few people will never be good business.
Your model suggests that they need to make all of their money back in whatever small window of time exists between the world finding out what chemical is in their drug and the next company - who paid nothing to do the research or prove the efficacy of the drug - cranking it out themselves.
Yes. Whether the "copycat" company has to pay for the research is irrelevant, as long as they fulfill their role of pressuring the innovating comapny to distribute as fast as possible.
The chemical makeup of that drug will probably be known by competition for years before the testing is even complete.
At that point we are no longer discussing patents.
The rest of the things you mention are not defenses of our patent system; they are critiques of the FDA. And I'm with you there.
Nobody? You might not touch a new product; maybe even the current Pharma companies wouldn't. But if there's a profit to be made, there will be no shortage of people there to take their place.
The way to counterbalance that is therefore to make sure that if you're first to market, you distribute the product as widely as possible, and _fast_. Which is exactly what we want.
It would simply give less incentive to be slow. The incentive to innovate- tons of money- would still be there. The runners-up would get far less if the innovator does his part right. Thus the incentive would be to be first. And thus to innovate.
It is fantastically expensive. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be done. There are huge rewards to be made when you have the ability to cure someone's disease; people will pay early, often, and lots for treatment, and companies will always rush to fill that gap, patents or no. If the innovating company does its job right, they deploy their product before the competition has a chance to copy the product. And if its not doing the job right, and the competition does copy and undersell the innovating company, then that company will go out of business, to be replaced by companies that can innovate and deploy to everyone quickly and efficiently, which is what we want in the first place. Patents merely reward having inefficient, slow rollouts- and especially reward slow rollouts that deliberately do not meet demand.
A pharmaceutical business climate based on first-to-market will have the added benefit of biasing companies towards developing medicines that are complete cures, and not treatments that take years or decades- the opposite of the current bias. It's currently a far worse business decision to conduct research in extremely aggressive leukemia, versus making the next Viagra. That shouldn't be.
Okay, three points. None of them are really dependent on the other, but they are all reasons why our current implementation (government-granted monopoly for 14-20 years) simply isn't the best.
First, I believe reverse - engineering is viable (but even if it's not, the rest of these still apply);
Second, nothing keeps us from having a shorter patent term that would still allow for the limited amount of openness we currently have (see #3);
Third, patents already encourage obfuscation in the application- if you write it clearly enough to understand, the patent examiner might realize that it's obvious and/or already patented. If we really want the knowledge to be public, we should use a patent system that does not encourage obfuscation.
Patents protect the innovators from having every vulture on the block swoop in, reverse engineer their product and manufacture and sell it as their own.
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
No, seriously. That gets the (often lifesaving, mind you) product to as many people as possible, as soon as possible, and has the added bonus of convincing the company that first made the product to distribute it as wide as possible instead of choosing the route of artificial scarcity (which is downright murder when you're talking about medicines) so that they can get the maximum possible reward for their innovation (which, again, also minimizes the reward to the "vuture" follwers-up, who will end up a month/week/year/whatever- behind).
But, for thoroughness's sake, let's suppose the innovating company's management botched the rollout and another company copied it, undersold their product and the original company goes bankrupt. Now what? Well, people will still demand better medicines, and they will still reward whoever is first to market with it. So, those companies that are simply copycats will continue to fill the niche market of deploying to markets where the first company could not, and the innovative companies will quickly learn how to do very vast deployments very quickly, and those that botch deployments consistently (which is bad anyway, we want the medicine distributed, after all) will go out of business, leaving more room and more potential revenue for those that do their role - inventing and deploying medicines - well.
Well, cutthroat razor-thin margins generally aren't bad, but it's hard to imagine how it would be profitable to sink billions of dollars and 20 years into developing a drug, when someone can compete with you when they're already billions of dollars and 20 years ahead, merely by using your published formula. Profitable? Progress is not necessarily profitable - look at NASA, DARPA, the Manhattan Project, America's Mechanization during WW2- all huge losses of money, but all incredibly innovative. And patents don't exist to make businesses profitable; they exist to promote progress. The relevant piece of information in your scenario, then, is the "billions of dollars" part. And that sounds good to me. That's what we want. What we don't really care for is the tens of billions spent on viagra or hair-loss ads.
The article's point was not that "patents" are bad, but that allowing an additional patent for an incremental upgrade is bad.
I didn't RTFA:P
Well, yes and no. It's the same in that the driving force behind Moore's law, the processors, are patented (rendering your example moot). It's different in that, even if you could legally copy the processor design, you'd have to put up a huge amount of capital (though you wouldn't need to do the research, that's a much smaller fraction of costs of bringing to market).
You're right; the designs are patented, and you're wrong; that doesn't render my argument moot. My argument- that the idea that pharmaceuticals need tremendous margins in orer to stay innovative is bunk - is quite correct. Just like with processors, there is a large enough cost of entry for medicine manufacturing that patent protection is not going to be the prime motivation for innovation. Like both AMD's and Intel's excellent offerings this year, the real incentive comes from getting more revenues by having best processor/medicine/whateverProduct, and patents are (or should be) a sideshow, if present at all.
Pharmas do innovate! Good. But would they have innovated more with no patents? With 3-year patents? With 60-year patents? That's the question to be asking here, not "they innovate, so everything's OK."
And they do fail sometimes, even with patents. When was the last time a big Pharma ran a net loss, let alone went bankrupt? If they're in the business of spending money to save lives, that should happen a lot more often.
That ignores the research competition they have to go through to find patentable medicines.
Well, sure. But there's no reason to letup on the competitive pressure. After all, the worst they could do is leave the business. And then what? Someone else would step in to make the profits that could be made, even without 20-year patents. Remember: our baseline is not "No innovation whatsoever." If people were no longer willing to invest billions if they couldn't get a monopoly (which turns out to be an extremely ineffecient model of getting revenue, oddly enough, and they end up spending a small fortune of potential research money on marketing), someone would be willing to invest billions to be first to market with the best product, and then they would distribute it as widely as possible, as fast as possible, to exploit the small advantage they have in being first.
Chipping away at the money they're making isn't going to be much of an incentive to stay in that line of work
Then let them leave. It's their decision to get into the market; it they can't possibly survive with all that nasty "competition," then maybe the competitive marketplace isn't for them, and they should get into something where talent, intelligence and hard work has less of an influence on your paycheck.
"Current orthodoxy claims patents encourage innovation, by allowing developers to enjoy profitable monopolies on their inventions which in turn inspire them to create new inventions" - this is still true.
Whether it is true or not misses the point. The question is not whether patents make Pharma stocks comfortable investments- that is never what a patent should be based on. Rather, the Government should only grant patents when they - as the constitution explicitly says- promote progress. The question we need to be asking, then, is "would a lack of patents lead to pharmaceutical companies investing less in research, or would it spur them to invest even more, so they could stay a step ahead of the competition without the 15-20 year lead of patents?" I don't see nearly enough people asking that question.
Without patents, patent-heavy fields like pharmaceutical research fall into cutthroat, razor-thin-margin price wars - but that is not a bad thing. In fact, it's not too different than desktop computers, where we've seen manufacturers keep up with Moore's law for a remarkable amount of time, even while having to struggle to break even on almost every product. Again, patents do not exist to provide peace of mind to investors; they exist only to promote progress. If ending them, and forcing pharmaceuticals to (*gasp*) innovate to stay in business (and even having a few go out of business when they fail to!) is the best way to promote progress, than that is exactly what we should do.
Of course, All of that only makes sense if Congress is competent and not corrupt... so much for that then.
Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia's, and also the people who choose to use their binary-only drivers.
Bzzt, wrong. Nationalization tends to give health care to those who would have otherwise died at 40, dropped out of middle school, received *nothing* for their national resources, or consumed dog food in the later years of their life.
/.
What again is wrong with South American oil having high prices? So far as I can tell, it is a 'bad thing' because it means the US of A doesn't get the oil at hugely below market prices due to contracts negotiated with puppet governments. That's the western version of the free market: Everyone else works, we get the benefit, and any change in that status quo is something to complain about on
Unless I'm in denial about either China or my intelligence, you're wrong. Care to elaborate on how China is a long-term threat to us? All I have been able to fathom is that they are very likely to overtake the United States economically, largely because they have a more productive populace. But how is that a threat? Is it a threat because they seem to be succeeding economically while their government continues to be relatively free of Washington's influence?
Seriously, the idea that a functioning non-capitalist economy (notwithstanding that China has a somewhat free market) is so offensive as to require total economic isolation and military incursions was something that was fashionable in the 60's. (Cuba anyone?) Don't tell me it's back again.
My friend's cousin's grand-uncle's doctor begs to differ!
As an example (that I'm sure is flawed in ways that will soon be pointed out to me), one partition on my laptop is encrypted. It's about 50 Gb of space. But no one can even be able to tell you how much free space there is - you have no idea how much of it I'm using, nor any practical way of finding out if it's being used at all.
No. The reason to use Free software is not because it is better; the reason to use Free software is because it is free.
That's the theory, at least. I still use the fglrx driver, because it *is* better for my computer (which I purchased in my ignorant pre-FOSS-aware-days). All the same, when I get a new computer, you better believe it's going to have an Intel graphics card, because then I won't have to choose between Free and better.
It's nontrivial, yes, but the advantage is we only have to do it once, and the basis is already laid in the traditions of science (the scientific method, peer review, etc).
On the other hand, right now we have to have an FDA that performs its duty correctly (keep in mind that while the FDA does not do the testing themselves, they do have to know what is involved in this testing, well enough to make sure that the private actors carry out their tests adequately) and a USPTO that does so as well, and heck, neither one seems to be doing such a great job. The point has been made elsewhere in this discussion that the Government doesn't mess everything up, especially when they have scientists driving the process, such as Los Alamos, DARPA, or NASA in the USA, and the plethora of government-funded social services in most other developed Western nations. A transparent process that can be vetted by the public and the research community would be far better than what we have now.
Also, it's worth considering that while there is a private company running the tests, it is in their interests to falsify or otherwise skew both their testing and their patent applications. Thus, the government's current responsibilities are compounded (or in theory, can be compounded, by people who have every reason to do so) by the people they are supposed to be regulating. While letting this be a publicly funded certainly wouldn't remove all incentive for deception, it would remove one of the strongest- the profit motive.
Okay, so the FDA charges obscene amounts for clinical trials. How it that an argument for patents?
If the FDA's approval process for new drugs is broken - fix it. The last thing I would think of is to build yet another government-regulated, easily broken construct to pay for the first government-regulated, definitely broken construct.
No... pages.
Why do people still say this? It's just plain not true.
UNIX is 35-odd years old. It's had bugs for all 35 years. Windows has been around for a much shorter time - indeed, things like file permissions and multi-user access didn't get added until NT (and boy, does it show!). The bugs that XP has now and Vista will have for the next 5 years are the same ones that UNIX ironed out in the 70's and 80's. That's why Linux and OSX are more secure than NT/XP, and why even if more people started using Linux or OSX, they would still have a far lower vulnerability rate than Windows.
I live in the South; I have for 10 years. But even if I live here for fifty, the day will never come when I see a confederate flag without being disgusted, and the day will never come when I don't immediately discount the humanity and civility of those who choose to fly it.
The confederate flag represents the ideology, government, and, yes, "culture" that holds a philosophy of hatred, dehumanization, and slavery. Glorifying that "heritage" is tasteless and idiotic, but most of all, it's offensive.
Dude, I just don't see that. Just put this image in your head: a fully grown warlord with a big old beard, and maybe a turban, and a unibrow you wouldn't believe - holding a lime green laptop and giggling while he sees the picture some other warlord drew for him (it looks a little like a malformed turkey).
Yeah. Okay. And as for terrorists - what are they going to do, make a beowulf cluster of XO laptops?
Okay, this is very much OT, but...
As I see it, advertising is a zero-gain game. You can only increase revenue to your own company by A) drawing it away from the competition or B) getting people to take it out of their savings account. In neither case does advertising actually generate wealth; it simply moves it (at great cost, of course- a very inefficient way of moving money).
There's always the "education" card, eg, "we're not advertising, we're educating the consumers about opportunities afforded to them by our products blah blah blah..." and that this somehow does produce better efficiency and thus wealth within the economy. Well, if it's really just a matter of getting information around to people, than in a society where we had information properly organized and distributed there would be no need for this "educational" advertising; people would know exactly what vendor to go to and who could be trusted for what and what rates would be fair. Thus, any wealth that advertising may generate for society only exists because our categorization of information is imperfect. That is a problem with a solution that does not need advertising.
Ultimately, though, outside of those special cases (and I am skeptical of even those) advertising does not "make" money. People would, ideally, spend exactly what they need to on exactly those products they need to and they'd be unswayed by advertising because they had all the information they needed.
In short, and in an extremely abstract form, advertising is a social solution to a technical problem. Sorry if that doesn't make any sense; it's just something I've had bouncing around for a while.
When you're right, you're right. We live without regard for other people so often that I've become desensitized to it. But hey, at least I feel some guilt for it, however little comfort it may be to those who need help and aren't getting it. I hope that at least keeps me from ever accepting it as "just the way it is."
/.), and there's no real way to rationalize it, beyond saying "I just don't care," which doesn't seem very nice, does it?
I think we all have become desensitized to the fact that people die unnecessarily while we watch soap operas (and post on
But not to get too heavy (or maybe we should?) - the issue remains that the best way to benefit from selling an artificially limited resource (for example, patented medicines) is to keep it scarce. And with medicines, it is indeed people's lives that are being manipulated.
Maybe we can draw a distinction, because I'm not selling the food that people are dying for lack of, nor am I making an effort to keep it scarce for my own personal gain.
No, I don't think that's a valid rationalization.
Actually, it's my belief that those diseases are where no free-market system can work. There will simply never be an economic incentive to deal with rare diseases, only a moral and social one. That's something for universities, charities and governments. Businesses *should* do what's good business, and performing expensive research on diseases that affect few people will never be good business.
The rest of the things you mention are not defenses of our patent system; they are critiques of the FDA. And I'm with you there.
Nobody? You might not touch a new product; maybe even the current Pharma companies wouldn't. But if there's a profit to be made, there will be no shortage of people there to take their place.
The way to counterbalance that is therefore to make sure that if you're first to market, you distribute the product as widely as possible, and _fast_. Which is exactly what we want.
It would simply give less incentive to be slow. The incentive to innovate- tons of money- would still be there. The runners-up would get far less if the innovator does his part right. Thus the incentive would be to be first. And thus to innovate.
It is fantastically expensive. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be done. There are huge rewards to be made when you have the ability to cure someone's disease; people will pay early, often, and lots for treatment, and companies will always rush to fill that gap, patents or no. If the innovating company does its job right, they deploy their product before the competition has a chance to copy the product. And if its not doing the job right, and the competition does copy and undersell the innovating company, then that company will go out of business, to be replaced by companies that can innovate and deploy to everyone quickly and efficiently, which is what we want in the first place. Patents merely reward having inefficient, slow rollouts- and especially reward slow rollouts that deliberately do not meet demand.
A pharmaceutical business climate based on first-to-market will have the added benefit of biasing companies towards developing medicines that are complete cures, and not treatments that take years or decades- the opposite of the current bias. It's currently a far worse business decision to conduct research in extremely aggressive leukemia, versus making the next Viagra. That shouldn't be.
Okay, three points. None of them are really dependent on the other, but they are all reasons why our current implementation (government-granted monopoly for 14-20 years) simply isn't the best.
First, I believe reverse - engineering is viable (but even if it's not, the rest of these still apply);
Second, nothing keeps us from having a shorter patent term that would still allow for the limited amount of openness we currently have (see #3);
Third, patents already encourage obfuscation in the application- if you write it clearly enough to understand, the patent examiner might realize that it's obvious and/or already patented. If we really want the knowledge to be public, we should use a patent system that does not encourage obfuscation.
No, seriously. That gets the (often lifesaving, mind you) product to as many people as possible, as soon as possible, and has the added bonus of convincing the company that first made the product to distribute it as wide as possible instead of choosing the route of artificial scarcity (which is downright murder when you're talking about medicines) so that they can get the maximum possible reward for their innovation (which, again, also minimizes the reward to the "vuture" follwers-up, who will end up a month/week/year/whatever- behind).
But, for thoroughness's sake, let's suppose the innovating company's management botched the rollout and another company copied it, undersold their product and the original company goes bankrupt. Now what? Well, people will still demand better medicines, and they will still reward whoever is first to market with it. So, those companies that are simply copycats will continue to fill the niche market of deploying to markets where the first company could not, and the innovative companies will quickly learn how to do very vast deployments very quickly, and those that botch deployments consistently (which is bad anyway, we want the medicine distributed, after all) will go out of business, leaving more room and more potential revenue for those that do their role - inventing and deploying medicines - well.
Where's the problem again?
Well, cutthroat razor-thin margins generally aren't bad, but it's hard to imagine how it would be profitable to sink billions of dollars and 20 years into developing a drug, when someone can compete with you when they're already billions of dollars and 20 years ahead, merely by using your published formula.
:P
Profitable? Progress is not necessarily profitable - look at NASA, DARPA, the Manhattan Project, America's Mechanization during WW2- all huge losses of money, but all incredibly innovative. And patents don't exist to make businesses profitable; they exist to promote progress. The relevant piece of information in your scenario, then, is the "billions of dollars" part. And that sounds good to me. That's what we want. What we don't really care for is the tens of billions spent on viagra or hair-loss ads.
The article's point was not that "patents" are bad, but that allowing an additional patent for an incremental upgrade is bad.
I didn't RTFA
Well, yes and no. It's the same in that the driving force behind Moore's law, the processors, are patented (rendering your example moot). It's different in that, even if you could legally copy the processor design, you'd have to put up a huge amount of capital (though you wouldn't need to do the research, that's a much smaller fraction of costs of bringing to market).
You're right; the designs are patented, and you're wrong; that doesn't render my argument moot. My argument- that the idea that pharmaceuticals need tremendous margins in orer to stay innovative is bunk - is quite correct. Just like with processors, there is a large enough cost of entry for medicine manufacturing that patent protection is not going to be the prime motivation for innovation. Like both AMD's and Intel's excellent offerings this year, the real incentive comes from getting more revenues by having best processor/medicine/whateverProduct, and patents are (or should be) a sideshow, if present at all.
Pharmas do innovate!
Good. But would they have innovated more with no patents? With 3-year patents? With 60-year patents? That's the question to be asking here, not "they innovate, so everything's OK."
And they do fail sometimes, even with patents.
When was the last time a big Pharma ran a net loss, let alone went bankrupt? If they're in the business of spending money to save lives, that should happen a lot more often.
That ignores the research competition they have to go through to find patentable medicines.
Well, sure. But there's no reason to letup on the competitive pressure. After all, the worst they could do is leave the business. And then what? Someone else would step in to make the profits that could be made, even without 20-year patents. Remember: our baseline is not "No innovation whatsoever." If people were no longer willing to invest billions if they couldn't get a monopoly (which turns out to be an extremely ineffecient model of getting revenue, oddly enough, and they end up spending a small fortune of potential research money on marketing), someone would be willing to invest billions to be first to market with the best product, and then they would distribute it as widely as possible, as fast as possible, to exploit the small advantage they have in being first.
That sounds good to me.
Like the Patent Office.
Without patents, patent-heavy fields like pharmaceutical research fall into cutthroat, razor-thin-margin price wars - but that is not a bad thing. In fact, it's not too different than desktop computers, where we've seen manufacturers keep up with Moore's law for a remarkable amount of time, even while having to struggle to break even on almost every product. Again, patents do not exist to provide peace of mind to investors; they exist only to promote progress. If ending them, and forcing pharmaceuticals to (*gasp*) innovate to stay in business (and even having a few go out of business when they fail to!) is the best way to promote progress, than that is exactly what we should do.
Of course, All of that only makes sense if Congress is competent and not corrupt... so much for that then.