2. No, it really isn't. Really. Pick ten NMEs (new molecular entities) approved last year. Tell me how much the NIH spent on them vs industry. Tell me how much the NIH spent on the 1000 NMEs that failed in phase I, II, or III testing vs what industry spent on them. Academic research finds a lot of drug targets... but that is the cheap part of drug R&D. Finding drugs and developing them is the expensive part, and academia does very little of that.
3. If they settle for less profit when they have the option of getting more, they will get bought out by someone who wouldn't.
4. see #3 for the US. Compulsory licensing is certainly an issue in other countries.
I would rather have (minor) damage to the environment than to continue to pay Hundreds of Billions of dollars a year to people who hate our guts and will kill after we (inadvertently) burn some of their holy books (despite our president's gracious apology).
Those aren't the choices. The choices are: a, huge subsidies and wars to support the oil industry; or b, huge subsidies and wars to support the oil industry plus polluted groundwater and other environmental damage from fracking.
Anyone with 98 billion dollars can afford better expertise than they can get from hiring investment banks or VC firms, which come with their own principal-agent and conflict of interest problems.
The problem is that Apple can also afford the best embezzlers and con men as well. Those people usually are the same as the "better expertise" you mention.
They're also the same as the investment banks I mentioned. My solution was to not hire an investment firm or an investment bank, but to buy the most powerful investment bank, so that their interests would be more tightly aligned, and they could draw on their political influence as well.
You assume that more companies paying dividends is a better thing. I don't see that as true. It is likely that with some change in dividend taxation that makes them competitive with capital gains (such as merely changing the law so that dividends are taxed at a modestly lower rate than declared capital gains), we'd see an increase in dividend paying companies, but I see the goal being the equalization of treatment of various income sources, not more companies paying dividends).
No, I don't assume that paying dividends is a better model,
I just assume that stock buybacks will continue to be preferred by corporations over dividends.
Companies that don't borrow against their stock price can survive even terrible market conditions by PROVIDING BENEFIT to their customers alone.
Unfortunately, they're just as likely to get bought out by a company that then borrows against their stock price. See: Romney.
When I invest in something, it's because I actually believe in the company based on something more than just erratic market trends. The value of my investment doesn't fluctuate with the moronic whims of a fickle market -- My returns actually reflect the company's profits.
I don't know if that investment exists. Just because you invest in a stable widget company in a stable widget market, there are stil plenty of erratic markets that can impinge on their cost of doing business.
Apple is neither an investment bank nor a venture capital firm. That is not their field of expertise, and it's likely that they won't make the most optimal decisions with the money. (It also creates a principal-agent problem where company executives have the incentive to invest in what they know and understand rather than what is most economically efficient.)
Anyone with 98 billion dollars can afford better expertise than they can get from hiring investment banks or VC firms, which come with their own principal-agent and conflict of interest problems. They can afford to buy Goldman Sachs outright (Twofer: Apple's lobbyists would become largely redundant) or to partner up 50:50 with, well, most of the VC firms. They'd still have plenty left over for a massive stock buyback.
I think the only way dividends will become popular again is if:
1. legislation passes that forces compensation plans in public companies to be tied to dividends instead of stock options or grants
2. capital gains taxes are brought in line with income taxes.
A: One that costs $5, will cure me in one dose without side effects, and tastes like strawberries.
OK, we've got that covered.
Q:(From the Article) “Please think about medications you have tried. Were you likely to need a lower or higher than usual dose?”
A:WTF? You did all those ADME and pharmacokinetics studies, body surface area vs body mass dosing calculations, and liver function tests, and you're asking me??
I'm hoping the article isn't really reflective of the company's methods. Otherwise it looks like their best "innovation" (working out ways to have patients in clinical trials stay at home instead of repeatedly come back to hospitals to be tested) is something major Pharma companies are already doing.
Over the past ~fifteen years the big pharma companies spent 4 to 12 billion dollars on R and D per approved drug.
No, that does not include marketing; Pharma companies would much rather have their marketing dollars recognized as such every quarter, they're not going to bury that budget in research.
Prices are set at absolutely the highest prices the market will bear, but that's true in pretty much every market, even ones without giant sunk costs.
The marketing more than pays for itself in higher sales; they wouldn't do it otherwise. The big cash sink for Pharma companies is stock buybacks: over the past decade their research efforts have failed so often that they've basically admitted that buying their own stock is a better way for them to compensate their CEOs, er, I mean protect shareholder value.
The main difference between pharma and every other business is just that business as usual becomes absolutely asinine when people's health is involved.
Jotform's webforms made it easy for script kiddies to launch their 'own' phishing attacks. Whether or not jotform was involved with many of the actual dollars lost to phishing, they were extremely visible because any annoying person could use jotform to cut and paste together an attack.
After another 6 months or so he will be able to keep his weight matching yours by eating and exercising about the same as you. The adaptation goes both ways.
The adaptation goes both ways, but there is a lot more hysteresis than just 6 months. The hormonal changes persist for at least a year:
Long-Term Persistence of Hormonal Adaptations to Weight Loss
Priya Sumithran, et al.,N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1597-1604
Other sources suggest at least 2 years before your body has significantly 'reset' to a lower weight:
Long-term weight loss maintenance.
Rena R Wing and Suzanne Phelan, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 82, No. 1, 222S-225S, July 2005
by burning fewer calories: your metabolism slows down as you lose weight. Imagine you have an identical twin. You're both the same weight now, but until 6 months ago your twin weighed 10% more than you; 6 months of dieting got him down to your weight. Now to stay the same weight as you, he'll have to eat several hundred calories per day less than you. Even if you both have exactly the same daily routine. His metabolism adapts to weight loss by slowing down and burning fewer calories. Not only that, appetite hormones react to significant weight loss by adjusting to levels normally associated with starvation.
The State of California followed in 1980, by implementing protection for its famous entrepreneurial culture. As of this writing Utah, Washington, North Carolina, Kansas, Delaware, and Illinois have also promoted new business formation by means of
similar laws
I remember when I started grad school in CA in the '90s the IP document I had to sign was so broad it covered literally everything. I could have written a kids novel or built a better mousetrap, either way the document claimed if any of the work was done during the period I was there they could claim it.
The reality was that IP assignment was, like many other things, apportioned via the serfdom system: the more clout you had the more control you got.
It's not a matter of expecting them to police content or users, it's a matter of MegaUpload's intentions.
But they weren't busted for their intentions, they were busted for breaking DMCA and other laws. Sidereel clearly is profiting from illegal content, but by avoiding actually hosting it seems to have stayed out of harms way despite being headquartered in California of all places. Whether or not a host that depends principally on pirated content for revenue can rely on obeying DMCA-takedowns and safe-harbor provisions/restrictions to the letter as protection has yet to be resolved.
No need to lock Asia out, just make a simple change to H1B and other work visas: make them completely portable. Once someone shows up in the US they're free to quit the company that sponsored them and go to whichever company they want. Or just hang out. Their visa is good at whichever company is willing to hire them, from day 1 til it expires, no petitions necessary. Companies sponsoring people for H1Bs would just have to balance the risk of losing their investments against actually paying them competitive rates for their services.
Cause we're all about the free markets here, right?
A sticking point for both smart boxes and TVs is licensing: Hulu (free) and even some Hulu+ content has licensing terms that basically say "not intended to be hooked up to your TV". None of the smart boxes or game consoles I've seen allow Hulu (free). OrbTV comes closest, but still needs a PC on the netwrok, and isn't HD). On the other hand Netflix streaming is partnered with microsoft (silverlight), so the only linux support is (I think) installing windows as a VM on your linux box. Eek.
Please please correct me if I'm wrong: If you want all of the Hulu(free) and possibly the Hulu+ content (without paying some other subscription fee, like Playon) as well as Netflix on your TV your current options are:
-a Windows or OS-X PC.
An android phone that can handle exporting HD is a possibility... but then your TV only works when its hooked up to your phone.
Seeing as Big Content is severely tightening licensing (Netflix may well be a shadow of its current self a year or two from now) I don't see smart TVs making much headway on these problems.
Even when they test on animals, they still have to test on humans because we react differently to chemicals than animals.
Animal testing doesn't get us as far as some people think it does.
Too true. But it's a lot like what Winston Churchill said about democracy: " No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
We absolutely suck at creating model systems in which to test drugs, but we're better than we used to be:)
or give you that much information.
Animals get used because individual cells and tissues can't stand in for a whole organism when it comes to, well, pretty much everything. They just don't behave the same. Adding an ATP sensor (of which there are already many) won't really change that, especially when there are plenty of other, more fine grained ways to measure toxicity. This seems more like an overhyped but otherwise very cool tool for studying respiration.
In my case I have no choice but to drive a large family vehicle because they don't make fuel efficient vehicles for large families, therefore my family suffers more at the pump than you.
Actually, your SUV or minivan is probably very efficient: per passenger mile. If you use it to transport your family instead of using it to commute to work, that is.
Plus, not all of us enjoy the hustle and bustle of city life and rather enjoy the peace and quite outside of the city. I personally will NEVER live in the city even if my commute is 2 hrs one way. Some people just don't like it so get over your chauvinistic ideas.
Well, that's 4 hours of unpaid work away from your family, 2 hours of childcare, and ~200 miles of vehicle usage per day.
Wouldn't you rather see your children occasionally and be able to afford to send them to college? The cost of gas alone for that commute would make for a college fund.
Nice, you start mixing economics and authorship. I consider authorship something to be preserved, but authorship doesn't bring money to your table. Doing a good work does: when I develop software for an organization i get paid for the software itself, not for being its author. Of course you may argue that both are conjoined, but that won't happen if I'm hired to maintain someone else's software... and I will still get paid for my work. But I get paid once, not a thousand, a million times.
Even more: a company I worked for keeps selling the software I developed, making a profit on it and my authorship isn't recognized. As authorship is already not being recognized and already being profited from, what's your point about it?
Copyright and the market mix economics and authorship - I'm just bringing it up. Without copyright, there's no rule against stripping the author's name from a work. As it stands, GPL and other licenses that preserve authorship without preserving distribution rights are built off of copyright/patent laws.
Why should all copyright laws and creation/compensation models be tailored to your work-for-hire model? Authorship may not be a big deal for you, but is certainly a big deal for anyone whose career depends on reputation with a mass audience. And while you may get paid once, many authors do get paid by the number of copies sold.
The issue of authors being ripped off by distributors isn't a copyright issue, it's a contract issue. Until you create an even more restrictive copyright system than the current one, one that mandates a certain percentage of the gross goes back to the actual human authors of a work, it will remain a contract issue. Do you want even more restrictive copyright/patent laws? I support minimum wage laws, I'd like to see them replaced with living wage laws, but I don't see minimum percentage laws for copyright as being workable.
My country recognizes the right* to make a private (archival) copy. Like a lot of other rights in the USA, the attached asterix has been taking a bigger and bigger bite out of the "right" over the past decade.
My idea of an ideal copyright would be 20 years for free, with up to another 20 years available for a nominal annual fee or a small % of the gross, whichever is greater.
How do you feel about a self-published author's copyright?
If his work is good enough I won't need to worry about that author's copyright: I will buy it. Actually, I already have: I've spend over 50 euros this Christmas buying copyrighted items. Of course having those items reasonably priced has helped a lot (see the $2.37M or so that the last Humble Indie Bundle has collected).
So you're OK with copying self-published works as well.
Would you have a problem with people taking games from the Humble bundle and selling them as their own work? How about someone's self published book that you didn't like?
Much of the advancement of civilization came before the invention of copyright. Many of the most important historical arts and sciences were done when the creator knew there was no copyright (in fact, most was done where the creator would not have had the copyright - Michaengelo's works were primarily work for hire where the de Medicis would have owned the copyright, not the creator). So anyone who can read a simple history book knows you are provably wrong (and those with an advanced understanding of history know history proves the opposite of your assertion).
Do you really want to compare how good the modern system is for fostering creativity compared to pre copyright/patent?
The previous system didn't support many creators, mostly those who were independently wealthy or managed to find a patron. Also, paying Michelangelo and his assistants was relatively cheap. How many patrons of the arts today are willing to put a hundred million dollars into financing a movie or a video game, sheerly for the bump to their reputation and a copy of the finished work to put on the mantel?
Much of the advancement of civilization came before copyright and patents, but most of the development of technology and the arts happened under (and was funded by) patents and copyrights. Pretty much all of modern medicine. Almost all of the books and songs ever written. Most of the tools, machines, and materials ever invented. Yes, people were creative before patents and copyrights, but not very many people got the chance to do it full time, because (for many reasons) there wasn't much money to be made off of creators, so no one paid them to be creative.
Slashdot Mirror
2. No, it really isn't. Really. Pick ten NMEs (new molecular entities) approved last year. Tell me how much the NIH spent on them vs industry. Tell me how much the NIH spent on the 1000 NMEs that failed in phase I, II, or III testing vs what industry spent on them. Academic research finds a lot of drug targets ... but that is the cheap part of drug R&D. Finding drugs and developing them is the expensive part, and academia does very little of that.
3. If they settle for less profit when they have the option of getting more, they will get bought out by someone who wouldn't.
4. see #3 for the US. Compulsory licensing is certainly an issue in other countries.
I would rather have (minor) damage to the environment than to continue to pay Hundreds of Billions of dollars a year to people who hate our guts and will kill after we (inadvertently) burn some of their holy books (despite our president's gracious apology).
Those aren't the choices. The choices are: a, huge subsidies and wars to support the oil industry; or b, huge subsidies and wars to support the oil industry plus polluted groundwater and other environmental damage from fracking.
Anyone with 98 billion dollars can afford better expertise than they can get from hiring investment banks or VC firms, which come with their own principal-agent and conflict of interest problems.
The problem is that Apple can also afford the best embezzlers and con men as well. Those people usually are the same as the "better expertise" you mention.
They're also the same as the investment banks I mentioned. My solution was to not hire an investment firm or an investment bank, but to buy the most powerful investment bank, so that their interests would be more tightly aligned, and they could draw on their political influence as well.
You assume that more companies paying dividends is a better thing. I don't see that as true. It is likely that with some change in dividend taxation that makes them competitive with capital gains (such as merely changing the law so that dividends are taxed at a modestly lower rate than declared capital gains), we'd see an increase in dividend paying companies, but I see the goal being the equalization of treatment of various income sources, not more companies paying dividends).
No, I don't assume that paying dividends is a better model, I just assume that stock buybacks will continue to be preferred by corporations over dividends.
Companies that don't borrow against their stock price can survive even terrible market conditions by PROVIDING BENEFIT to their customers alone.
Unfortunately, they're just as likely to get bought out by a company that then borrows against their stock price. See: Romney.
When I invest in something, it's because I actually believe in the company based on something more than just erratic market trends. The value of my investment doesn't fluctuate with the moronic whims of a fickle market -- My returns actually reflect the company's profits.
I don't know if that investment exists. Just because you invest in a stable widget company in a stable widget market, there are stil plenty of erratic markets that can impinge on their cost of doing business.
Apple is neither an investment bank nor a venture capital firm. That is not their field of expertise, and it's likely that they won't make the most optimal decisions with the money. (It also creates a principal-agent problem where company executives have the incentive to invest in what they know and understand rather than what is most economically efficient.)
Anyone with 98 billion dollars can afford better expertise than they can get from hiring investment banks or VC firms, which come with their own principal-agent and conflict of interest problems. They can afford to buy Goldman Sachs outright (Twofer: Apple's lobbyists would become largely redundant) or to partner up 50:50 with, well, most of the VC firms. They'd still have plenty left over for a massive stock buyback.
I think the only way dividends will become popular again is if:
1. legislation passes that forces compensation plans in public companies to be tied to dividends instead of stock options or grants
2. capital gains taxes are brought in line with income taxes.
neither of which is going to happen.
A: One that costs $5, will cure me in one dose without side effects, and tastes like strawberries.
OK, we've got that covered.
Q:(From the Article) “Please think about medications you have tried. Were you likely to need a lower or higher than usual dose?”
A:WTF? You did all those ADME and pharmacokinetics studies, body surface area vs body mass dosing calculations, and liver function tests, and you're asking me??
I'm hoping the article isn't really reflective of the company's methods. Otherwise it looks like their best "innovation" (working out ways to have patients in clinical trials stay at home instead of repeatedly come back to hospitals to be tested) is something major Pharma companies are already doing.
No, that does not include marketing; Pharma companies would much rather have their marketing dollars recognized as such every quarter, they're not going to bury that budget in research.
Prices are set at absolutely the highest prices the market will bear, but that's true in pretty much every market, even ones without giant sunk costs.
The marketing more than pays for itself in higher sales; they wouldn't do it otherwise. The big cash sink for Pharma companies is stock buybacks: over the past decade their research efforts have failed so often that they've basically admitted that buying their own stock is a better way for them to compensate their CEOs, er, I mean protect shareholder value.
The main difference between pharma and every other business is just that business as usual becomes absolutely asinine when people's health is involved.
Jotform's webforms made it easy for script kiddies to launch their 'own' phishing attacks. Whether or not jotform was involved with many of the actual dollars lost to phishing, they were extremely visible because any annoying person could use jotform to cut and paste together an attack.
And they came for Massey Energy, which instead of a criminal trial is receiving a (tax deductible) fine.
And they didn't come for Union Carbide ... not their jurisdiction, sorry.
And they came for the meat packing plants ... they took the undocumented workers, and left the MRSA and O157:H7 E. coli in place.
And they came for San Diego Gas and Electric for causing a 200,000 acre fire, and decided the ratepayers (not the stock holders) will pay the fine.
After another 6 months or so he will be able to keep his weight matching yours by eating and exercising about the same as you. The adaptation goes both ways.
The adaptation goes both ways, but there is a lot more hysteresis than just 6 months. The hormonal changes persist for at least a year:
Long-Term Persistence of Hormonal Adaptations to Weight Loss Priya Sumithran, et al.,N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1597-1604
Other sources suggest at least 2 years before your body has significantly 'reset' to a lower weight:
Long-term weight loss maintenance. Rena R Wing and Suzanne Phelan, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 82, No. 1, 222S-225S, July 2005
by burning fewer calories: your metabolism slows down as you lose weight. Imagine you have an identical twin. You're both the same weight now, but until 6 months ago your twin weighed 10% more than you; 6 months of dieting got him down to your weight. Now to stay the same weight as you, he'll have to eat several hundred calories per day less than you. Even if you both have exactly the same daily routine. His metabolism adapts to weight loss by slowing down and burning fewer calories. Not only that, appetite hormones react to significant weight loss by adjusting to levels normally associated with starvation.
I'm having the flu right now, and yet, my buddies and I just had an intense workout out for over an hour at the gym, and I didn't even feel tired.
I'm glad you feel so healthy, but please stay away from the gym while you're coughing, sneezing, or barfing.
The State of California followed in 1980, by implementing protection for its famous entrepreneurial culture. As of this writing Utah, Washington, North Carolina, Kansas, Delaware, and Illinois have also promoted new business formation by means of similar laws
I remember when I started grad school in CA in the '90s the IP document I had to sign was so broad it covered literally everything. I could have written a kids novel or built a better mousetrap, either way the document claimed if any of the work was done during the period I was there they could claim it. The reality was that IP assignment was, like many other things, apportioned via the serfdom system: the more clout you had the more control you got.
It's not a matter of expecting them to police content or users, it's a matter of MegaUpload's intentions.
But they weren't busted for their intentions, they were busted for breaking DMCA and other laws. Sidereel clearly is profiting from illegal content, but by avoiding actually hosting it seems to have stayed out of harms way despite being headquartered in California of all places. Whether or not a host that depends principally on pirated content for revenue can rely on obeying DMCA-takedowns and safe-harbor provisions/restrictions to the letter as protection has yet to be resolved.
Cause we're all about the free markets here, right?
Please please correct me if I'm wrong: If you want all of the Hulu(free) and possibly the Hulu+ content (without paying some other subscription fee, like Playon) as well as Netflix on your TV your current options are:
-a Windows or OS-X PC.
An android phone that can handle exporting HD is a possibility ... but then your TV only works when its hooked up to your phone.
Seeing as Big Content is severely tightening licensing (Netflix may well be a shadow of its current self a year or two from now) I don't see smart TVs making much headway on these problems.
That's not the US. That's just business. Everywhere.
Don't ever go to Europe. You'd hate it.
Even when they test on animals, they still have to test on humans because we react differently to chemicals than animals.
Too true. But it's a lot like what Winston Churchill said about democracy: " No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." We absolutely suck at creating model systems in which to test drugs, but we're better than we used to be :)
A sensor doesn't need food, water or shelter.
or give you that much information. Animals get used because individual cells and tissues can't stand in for a whole organism when it comes to, well, pretty much everything. They just don't behave the same. Adding an ATP sensor (of which there are already many) won't really change that, especially when there are plenty of other, more fine grained ways to measure toxicity. This seems more like an overhyped but otherwise very cool tool for studying respiration.
yes, get a Subaru -if there's a dealership near you. Don't count on that in the rural midwest.
In my case I have no choice but to drive a large family vehicle because they don't make fuel efficient vehicles for large families, therefore my family suffers more at the pump than you.
Actually, your SUV or minivan is probably very efficient: per passenger mile. If you use it to transport your family instead of using it to commute to work, that is.
Plus, not all of us enjoy the hustle and bustle of city life and rather enjoy the peace and quite outside of the city. I personally will NEVER live in the city even if my commute is 2 hrs one way. Some people just don't like it so get over your chauvinistic ideas.
Well, that's 4 hours of unpaid work away from your family, 2 hours of childcare, and ~200 miles of vehicle usage per day. Wouldn't you rather see your children occasionally and be able to afford to send them to college? The cost of gas alone for that commute would make for a college fund.
Why not compare a $10K used SUV to an $10k used hatchback that gets 30 mpg?
Nice, you start mixing economics and authorship. I consider authorship something to be preserved, but authorship doesn't bring money to your table. Doing a good work does: when I develop software for an organization i get paid for the software itself, not for being its author. Of course you may argue that both are conjoined, but that won't happen if I'm hired to maintain someone else's software... and I will still get paid for my work. But I get paid once, not a thousand, a million times.
Even more: a company I worked for keeps selling the software I developed, making a profit on it and my authorship isn't recognized. As authorship is already not being recognized and already being profited from, what's your point about it?
Copyright and the market mix economics and authorship - I'm just bringing it up. Without copyright, there's no rule against stripping the author's name from a work. As it stands, GPL and other licenses that preserve authorship without preserving distribution rights are built off of copyright/patent laws.
Why should all copyright laws and creation/compensation models be tailored to your work-for-hire model? Authorship may not be a big deal for you, but is certainly a big deal for anyone whose career depends on reputation with a mass audience. And while you may get paid once, many authors do get paid by the number of copies sold. The issue of authors being ripped off by distributors isn't a copyright issue, it's a contract issue. Until you create an even more restrictive copyright system than the current one, one that mandates a certain percentage of the gross goes back to the actual human authors of a work, it will remain a contract issue. Do you want even more restrictive copyright/patent laws? I support minimum wage laws, I'd like to see them replaced with living wage laws, but I don't see minimum percentage laws for copyright as being workable. My country recognizes the right* to make a private (archival) copy. Like a lot of other rights in the USA, the attached asterix has been taking a bigger and bigger bite out of the "right" over the past decade. My idea of an ideal copyright would be 20 years for free, with up to another 20 years available for a nominal annual fee or a small % of the gross, whichever is greater.
How do you feel about a self-published author's copyright?
If his work is good enough I won't need to worry about that author's copyright: I will buy it. Actually, I already have: I've spend over 50 euros this Christmas buying copyrighted items. Of course having those items reasonably priced has helped a lot (see the $2.37M or so that the last Humble Indie Bundle has collected).
So you're OK with copying self-published works as well. Would you have a problem with people taking games from the Humble bundle and selling them as their own work? How about someone's self published book that you didn't like?
Much of the advancement of civilization came before the invention of copyright. Many of the most important historical arts and sciences were done when the creator knew there was no copyright (in fact, most was done where the creator would not have had the copyright - Michaengelo's works were primarily work for hire where the de Medicis would have owned the copyright, not the creator). So anyone who can read a simple history book knows you are provably wrong (and those with an advanced understanding of history know history proves the opposite of your assertion).
Do you really want to compare how good the modern system is for fostering creativity compared to pre copyright/patent? The previous system didn't support many creators, mostly those who were independently wealthy or managed to find a patron. Also, paying Michelangelo and his assistants was relatively cheap. How many patrons of the arts today are willing to put a hundred million dollars into financing a movie or a video game, sheerly for the bump to their reputation and a copy of the finished work to put on the mantel? Much of the advancement of civilization came before copyright and patents, but most of the development of technology and the arts happened under (and was funded by) patents and copyrights. Pretty much all of modern medicine. Almost all of the books and songs ever written. Most of the tools, machines, and materials ever invented. Yes, people were creative before patents and copyrights, but not very many people got the chance to do it full time, because (for many reasons) there wasn't much money to be made off of creators, so no one paid them to be creative.