"that would create a huge liability for patent holders"
I dont see how that's a problem. In fact, it sounds like a very good incentive for patent holders to obtain "good" patents and avoid trying to get junk patents approved.
And heck, maybe that would get both sides interested in moving to a non-adversarial system of innovation incentives.
"As soon as you're notified, you'd better license"
So, if the patent turns out to be invalid, do you get your license fees back? Or even better, treble damages for what, without a valid patent, amounts to extortion?
"B) Because its licensing terms are far more predictable..."
As in you can't use the source. At all. For any purpose. Well, sure, it's certainly predictable.
"C) Because the company that is maintaining the product is far more likely to stay in business and motivate itself to the kinds of support that you need."
New to the industry, eh?
Even if you ignore the fact that products will be altered beyond recognition and eventually discontinued, with or without the company surviving, the fact is very few companies in the proprietary software business appear to have any particular long term staying power. If they dont go belly up, they get bought up, their products cancelled, and customers forcefully migrated.
"D) Because most open source projects are simply half-assed and under-staffed."
And most proprietary projects are half-assed and under-staffed. It's endemic to the entire industry. At least with opensource you can discover it was half-assed before paying through the nose for a disconnected support number.
"they cannot afford the time and technical resources in practice to maintain said software themselves."
But if necessary they have the option. And while one company might not have the resources needed, several customers working together may very well have the resources (after all, the combined customers were the ones actually paying for the resources originally, so unless the initial producer was deliberately sinking money into the development without intending to profit, the resources still exist).
"This might work in some places where there is a large difference in temperature"
You dont really need that much of a temperature difference to generate electricity; there are model stirling engines that work off the difference between the heat of the air and the heat of your hand.
Of course, you still do need enough of a total stored energy diffrential to actually generate the electricity needed, so at low diffrentials you may need larger initial storage generators or storage volume.
However, what this article misses is the fact that the lost customers are still lost customers; those 'less' people are people who could also be buying Sony's products, but now are not. Sony being able to spend enough marketing to not slip in absolute numbers (if you take the marketing company's data at face value) doesnt change the fact that they slip in relative numbers compared to where they'd be without the negative incidents.
"Akamai is a distributed hosting service, not a common carrier."
Indeed. Further, I've seen little in the way of suggestions in the net neutrality debate that would prevent ISPs from setting up their own pay-for cache services.
Of course, the whole point of non-net-neutrality from those particular ISPs is usually to avoid delivering on promises and taking the cheap-ass way out and simply rate limiting people they can extort money from rather than offer a value added service.
"This guy is seriously a professor?"
Unfortunately there's nothing preventing professors from commenting on things they have little or no understanding or knowledge about. But hey, this is Slashdot, he should get an account and join the club.
Few people engage in violence _for_ a cause. They engage in warfare _against_ an enemy.
Take a look at the propaganda constantly thrown at us; it's not intended to make us engage in war _for_ something. It would be almost impossible to align a large number of people for a specific cause when they're around eachother and would have to discuss the actual contents of the cause (heck, even us western democrats can hardly agree on how a country should be governed).
It's much easier to demonize the enemy, claim they're a threat and claim they want something evil for you. Few can question the demonization, as that brands _you_ a sympathizer, anti-defender, not to mention that as most people arent able to actually verify or disprove the claims, they'll have to take the propaganda at face value.
If you in and analyze the numbers on the books of the pharmaceuticals you'll also note a other vast differences between their financials and companies like your car producer.
IIRC, the breakdown is something like this:
Pharmaceutical: 35% production 35% marketing and administration 15% R&D 15% profit
Cars: 80% production 10% marketing and administration 5% R&D 5% profit
Now, the pharmaceuticals of course claim that they invest a high amount in R&D, with the comparison against other industries. However, what it really shows is that for a functional competetive industry, a large part of the end-price is the actual cost of producing the product (which, incidentally, is also why you dont get a problem with illegal car copies). It also shows that the efficiency of the industry is horrific; generics can usually be produced at a fraction of the price, so the 35% representing production would probably be cut to at least a third in a competetive market.
End result; the vast overfinancing created by monopoly revenue is grossly inefficient in steering money towards the supposed goals, and instead create a waste unseen in other industry.
And DRM means no money, as the end users will get the non-DRM'ed versions elsewhere instead.
"You can't produce a film in your basement"
Well, true, you need a kitchen, a livingroom and five PC's (see Star Wreck):). Seriously tho, it's on the verge of becoming debatable; the cost of high quality effects, bluescreen tech and quality recording and editing capacity is plummeting. And actors have never been particularly rare (see any local theatre or dozen).
That aside; if you instead compare with TV financing schemes, you get a vastly different equation. If $30 per month can finance a whole load of channels sending non-stop things I'm not watching anyway, why would paying $10 per month for a select number of shows be untenable?
I have to agree. If someone starts offering an emusic.com like service for video (ie, high quality, DRM free content) I'd subscribe in a heartbeat. But the current crop of crap?
It ain't the price that makes torrent sites a far more compelling offer.
"I'm intrigued to hear from someone to explain why they don't want these cameras around."
Basically distrust. See the many cases where the prosecution is more interested in getting _someone_ convicted, rather than the right one convicted. Do a wikipedia search on 'wrongful conviction' for a crosssection.
Massive surveillance generates a huge amount of data. That data can easily be selectively used to build a circumstantial case; with good enough tools and a large enough database you'd basically just have to enter the criteria and you get that someone (or a whole bunch of someones out of which you pick the easiest target) that you might get convicted. Think they'd search for exonerating data? Or even allow your defense access to search for exonerating data? Again, see the previous wikipedia search. Heck, see the current 'terrorist' concept, where people dont even need to be told what they're accused of, nor even are even given the right to defend themselves.
"what's the difference between a policeman watching you in person"
Because you cannot search fifty thousand policeman brains for who, out of five million faces, randomly might have been in the vincinity of some crimes. The policeman would have to actually see something suspicious to actually take note (in which case they may actually, unlike the camera, do something about the possible crime).
Of course, all this is under the assumption that the cameras are used as the prosecutions wet dream rather than as a means to ascertain what actually happened. But with the current data aggregation desire apparent, and with, again, the previously mention propensity to convict someone rather than the right one, I dont find it particularly hard to see where it's going.
"Large profits give drug companies an incentive to develop the most useful medicines"
No. A monopoly give drug companies a large incentive for marketing. And fails to give drug companies appropriate market incentive for efficiency. 80% of pharma revenue is spent on marketing, administration and inefficient production. The R&D is just a necessary evil to obtail the particular monopoly necessary; witness the classic twist-a-molecule game to gain another 20 years monopoly with minimum investment and minimum improvement over current drugs (coincidentally, the particular game that is turned against the pharmaceuticals in this case).
"Look at it this way: What's better -- not having a drug at all, or having the drug be very costly for about 14 years and then having cheap generic equivalent?"
How about this alternative: having _five times_ the current amount of medical R&D and no pharma marketing at no increase in cost, or the same R&D but at a fifth of the cost and no pharma marketing?
Monopolies are a crap way to create any way or form of efficiency. The IP sector is no different from any other sector; protect companies from competition and you get bloated inefficient organizations capable of wasting unlimited amounts of funding and revenue.
Of course you'll see those bloated corporations claiming the monopoly is necessary; for their current level of inefficiency it _is_ necessary. However, that inefficiency itself isnt necessary, and a free market situation would force them to correct it, while leaving us free to more appropriately steer money into R&D.
Actually, even better, he should start out in a cave and work from there. After all, why grant an exclusive right on something when most of it comes from the public pool of knowledge anyway?
And, hey, maybe if he's a super genious he might get as far as figuring out how a pointed stick works.
"Think of it this way: if those companies weren't guaranteed profit in case of discovering something useful, they wouldn't do the research in the first place."
Except, of course, they're not guaranteed the profit for the research, they're guaranteed the profit from having a monopoly. Which essentially means their incentive is to get as much profit out of the monopoly as possible (ie, a huge incentive for marketing) while investing the bare minimum necessary to gain another monopoly into research.
And, of course, ignoring the fact that if we didnt grant those monopolies could very well be spending the money now going to the pharmas directly on research instead, thus getting more than five times the R&D done for the same amount of money we spend on medicines today.
Depends on the patent system. IIRC, the system in India specifically only granted the patent on the specific process to make the compound, which let generics manufacturers develop different methods of synthesis and produce the same compound. While, again, if I remember correctly, other countries granted the patent on the method by which the specific compound worked, essentially meaning the medicine itself is patented.
"40GB hard drive in it, which immediately makes it a couple of years"
You overestimate the shite the bigname vendors put in their entry level systems. A low end HP 'server' can ship with an 80GB drive today, I wouldnt be surprised if 40GB drives were still shipping a few months ago.
The fact that they're actually selling machines with components that have been rare in retail for quite some time makes one wonder where they're getting the parts. Refurbished junk, perhaps? Guess that would be good for the margin.
"you won't be able to get the parts to turn a dead box back into a live one"
Yes, well, another reason to avoid 'brand name' boxes like the plague and buy standard components.
Ok. Here's the wikipedia description: "the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, corporatism, anti-liberalism, and anti-communism."
You were saying?
"we were part of the solution the last time such REAL nasty people took over Europe"
Most of the solution the last time were the Soviet communists under Stalin. Does that make the communists 'good', or that Europe should ignore the rest of what Stalin did?
The sad thing is that it'll be hard to find someone to free the Americans when they need help getting liberated.
Compare Fedora with the Ubuntu minor releases and RHEL (or CentOS) for the major LTS releases.
If you look at jkeatings blog is sounds more like an extension of support time for the FC releases is likely, and those requiring long time support are pointed towards RHEL/CentOS, which probably are better matches for long term needs anyway.
Personally, I'd say the existence of CentOS made the legacy project far less essential.
Really, the barely computer literate arent a problem, and they become far easier to support on Linux. It's the 'think they know what they're doing' people who are a pain as they'll be upset when they cant break their systems in the same way they used to.
Of course, they'd come complaining to you when they borked their system in XP too, so as a supporting relative you're almost always better off with the family on Linux (with the possible exception being when you have a competent Windows admin in the family who'll be doing the support (lucky guy...)).
Good point. We need to combine this with a law requireing any occupants of the car beside the driver to be bound and gagged to ensure a distraction free environment.
There is lots of empirical evidence. Google on "cell phone drunk", and you'll find a host of studies ranging cell phone use (both with and without handsfree) while driving about as dangerous as driving drunk.
A better explanation, of course, is that he's a sock puppet. That fits the rest even better, without resorting to Bush doing a brilliant portrayal of stupid.
You must mean 'car copiers'. Of course, I have yet to see a car alarm system prevent unauthorized copying of a car.
But you can bet that if the gas station had not only a car washer but also a car copier we'd see the car industry yelling about how car copying was going to kill the industry and how cars would have to be protected from copying, and find a whole host of reasons why cars had to cost $20K+ even tho the car copier could churn out copies the whole day long for a couple of bucks worth of raw matter...
As for the issue of cost of producing the first copy, _deal_ with it. The opensource community (and other highly competetive industries) has already shown how you do it; quit it with the multi-billion dollar sink-or-swim projects, release rapid incremental changes where you recuperate investment from your first mover advantage. The days where you locked yourself in your room for ten years and came out with something great are over and gone. By the time you're finished the small daily steps of the world will have left your solitary development a decade behind in the dust; collaborative interchange is vastly more powerful than the ivory tower.
As the advertizers have to pay someone to make you view it, and as people pay for, or go to extreme lengths to avoid viewing it, the data can actually be considered negative value, rather than worthless, data.
As such, all advertizing money should be subtracted from GDP reporting. Maybe then we can finally get rid of it.
"they give a monopoly on ONE way to cure the disease."
Depending on the breadth of the patent. In the cases where there are multiple routes of attack, while there may be legitimate reasons (as per side effects, etc) to develop a multitude of alternate treatments, it is not necessarily the best way to spend R&D money to have fifteen ways to cure a particular popular disease rather than five good ways to cure that disease and five ways each for two others. As you mention (better?) in paranthesis I suppose you see that.
"Developing a new drug costs around $1Bn and takes close to 10 years."
Under the current market construct. A competetive market driven system would quite likely lower those costs by a large margin. Monopoly protection is incomparably good at creating huge costs (costs tend to rise to fill available capital); compare the costs of production and development in other protected sectors ranging from Soviet state factories through open source versus proprietary software.
"not that you specify any"
Ok, here's a few quick variations (with their own drawbacks) off the top of my head:
Mandatory licensing. Any and all competitors may license a particular development at the same price (as company internal production), essentially separating R&D and marketing, administration and manufacturing into a separate competetive area.
R&D recovery caps; patents are limited in recuperative amount to for example a minimum fixed sum or scale like 1.5-2 times R&D investment. After that they expire.
Joint financed R as the insurance companies and/or other social financing systems are the ones paying five times the cost of the R&D for the medicines, they'd save huge amounts of money simply financing the R&D themselves and licensing the production to generics producers.
Etc. You're free to invent even more systems; the trick is to concentrate on the purpose: to maximize efficiency and tie the rewards to the _R&D_, while not creating a protected economic sector.
"that drug companies are murderers if they don't give away their products"
It would be more appropriate for the WTO lobbyists and those pushing the current system. There's an overlap, and the pharmas are strongly tied to those lobbying efforts, but a blanket blame may be an oversimplification.
Slashdot Mirror
"that would create a huge liability for patent holders"
I dont see how that's a problem. In fact, it sounds like a very good incentive for patent holders to obtain "good" patents and avoid trying to get junk patents approved.
And heck, maybe that would get both sides interested in moving to a non-adversarial system of innovation incentives.
"As soon as you're notified, you'd better license"
So, if the patent turns out to be invalid, do you get your license fees back? Or even better, treble damages for what, without a valid patent, amounts to extortion?
"B) Because its licensing terms are far more predictable..."
As in you can't use the source. At all. For any purpose. Well, sure, it's certainly predictable.
"C) Because the company that is maintaining the product is far more likely to stay in business and motivate itself to the kinds of support that you need."
New to the industry, eh?
Even if you ignore the fact that products will be altered beyond recognition and eventually discontinued, with or without the company surviving, the fact is very few companies in the proprietary software business appear to have any particular long term staying power. If they dont go belly up, they get bought up, their products cancelled, and customers forcefully migrated.
"D) Because most open source projects are simply half-assed and under-staffed."
And most proprietary projects are half-assed and under-staffed. It's endemic to the entire industry. At least with opensource you can discover it was half-assed before paying through the nose for a disconnected support number.
"they cannot afford the time and technical resources in practice to maintain said software themselves."
But if necessary they have the option. And while one company might not have the resources needed, several customers working together may very well have the resources (after all, the combined customers were the ones actually paying for the resources originally, so unless the initial producer was deliberately sinking money into the development without intending to profit, the resources still exist).
"This might work in some places where there is a large difference in temperature"
You dont really need that much of a temperature difference to generate electricity; there are model stirling engines that work off the difference between the heat of the air and the heat of your hand.
Of course, you still do need enough of a total stored energy diffrential to actually generate the electricity needed, so at low diffrentials you may need larger initial storage generators or storage volume.
"way less people are pissed about Sony"
However, what this article misses is the fact that the lost customers are still lost customers; those 'less' people are people who could also be buying Sony's products, but now are not. Sony being able to spend enough marketing to not slip in absolute numbers (if you take the marketing company's data at face value) doesnt change the fact that they slip in relative numbers compared to where they'd be without the negative incidents.
"Akamai is a distributed hosting service, not a common carrier."
Indeed. Further, I've seen little in the way of suggestions in the net neutrality debate that would prevent ISPs from setting up their own pay-for cache services.
Of course, the whole point of non-net-neutrality from those particular ISPs is usually to avoid delivering on promises and taking the cheap-ass way out and simply rate limiting people they can extort money from rather than offer a value added service.
"This guy is seriously a professor?"
Unfortunately there's nothing preventing professors from commenting on things they have little or no understanding or knowledge about. But hey, this is Slashdot, he should get an account and join the club.
Few people engage in violence _for_ a cause. They engage in warfare _against_ an enemy.
Take a look at the propaganda constantly thrown at us; it's not intended to make us engage in war _for_ something. It would be almost impossible to align a large number of people for a specific cause when they're around eachother and would have to discuss the actual contents of the cause (heck, even us western democrats can hardly agree on how a country should be governed).
It's much easier to demonize the enemy, claim they're a threat and claim they want something evil for you. Few can question the demonization, as that brands _you_ a sympathizer, anti-defender, not to mention that as most people arent able to actually verify or disprove the claims, they'll have to take the propaganda at face value.
If you in and analyze the numbers on the books of the pharmaceuticals you'll also note a other vast differences between their financials and companies like your car producer.
IIRC, the breakdown is something like this:
Pharmaceutical:
35% production
35% marketing and administration
15% R&D
15% profit
Cars:
80% production
10% marketing and administration
5% R&D
5% profit
Now, the pharmaceuticals of course claim that they invest a high amount in R&D, with the comparison against other industries. However, what it really shows is that for a functional competetive industry, a large part of the end-price is the actual cost of producing the product (which, incidentally, is also why you dont get a problem with illegal car copies). It also shows that the efficiency of the industry is horrific; generics can usually be produced at a fraction of the price, so the 35% representing production would probably be cut to at least a third in a competetive market.
End result; the vast overfinancing created by monopoly revenue is grossly inefficient in steering money towards the supposed goals, and instead create a waste unseen in other industry.
"DRM means no studio support"
:). Seriously tho, it's on the verge of becoming debatable; the cost of high quality effects, bluescreen tech and quality recording and editing capacity is plummeting. And actors have never been particularly rare (see any local theatre or dozen).
And DRM means no money, as the end users will get the non-DRM'ed versions elsewhere instead.
"You can't produce a film in your basement"
Well, true, you need a kitchen, a livingroom and five PC's (see Star Wreck)
That aside; if you instead compare with TV financing schemes, you get a vastly different equation. If $30 per month can finance a whole load of channels sending non-stop things I'm not watching anyway, why would paying $10 per month for a select number of shows be untenable?
I have to agree. If someone starts offering an emusic.com like service for video (ie, high quality, DRM free content) I'd subscribe in a heartbeat. But the current crop of crap?
It ain't the price that makes torrent sites a far more compelling offer.
"I'm intrigued to hear from someone to explain why they don't want these cameras around."
Basically distrust. See the many cases where the prosecution is more interested in getting _someone_ convicted, rather than the right one convicted. Do a wikipedia search on 'wrongful conviction' for a crosssection.
Massive surveillance generates a huge amount of data. That data can easily be selectively used to build a circumstantial case; with good enough tools and a large enough database you'd basically just have to enter the criteria and you get that someone (or a whole bunch of someones out of which you pick the easiest target) that you might get convicted. Think they'd search for exonerating data? Or even allow your defense access to search for exonerating data? Again, see the previous wikipedia search. Heck, see the current 'terrorist' concept, where people dont even need to be told what they're accused of, nor even are even given the right to defend themselves.
"what's the difference between a policeman watching you in person"
Because you cannot search fifty thousand policeman brains for who, out of five million faces, randomly might have been in the vincinity of some crimes. The policeman would have to actually see something suspicious to actually take note (in which case they may actually, unlike the camera, do something about the possible crime).
Of course, all this is under the assumption that the cameras are used as the prosecutions wet dream rather than as a means to ascertain what actually happened. But with the current data aggregation desire apparent, and with, again, the previously mention propensity to convict someone rather than the right one, I dont find it particularly hard to see where it's going.
"Large profits give drug companies an incentive to develop the most useful medicines"
No. A monopoly give drug companies a large incentive for marketing. And fails to give drug companies appropriate market incentive for efficiency. 80% of pharma revenue is spent on marketing, administration and inefficient production. The R&D is just a necessary evil to obtail the particular monopoly necessary; witness the classic twist-a-molecule game to gain another 20 years monopoly with minimum investment and minimum improvement over current drugs (coincidentally, the particular game that is turned against the pharmaceuticals in this case).
"Look at it this way: What's better -- not having a drug at all, or having the drug be very costly for about 14 years and then having cheap generic equivalent?"
How about this alternative: having _five times_ the current amount of medical R&D and no pharma marketing at no increase in cost, or the same R&D but at a fifth of the cost and no pharma marketing?
Monopolies are a crap way to create any way or form of efficiency. The IP sector is no different from any other sector; protect companies from competition and you get bloated inefficient organizations capable of wasting unlimited amounts of funding and revenue.
Of course you'll see those bloated corporations claiming the monopoly is necessary; for their current level of inefficiency it _is_ necessary. However, that inefficiency itself isnt necessary, and a free market situation would force them to correct it, while leaving us free to more appropriately steer money into R&D.
Actually, even better, he should start out in a cave and work from there. After all, why grant an exclusive right on something when most of it comes from the public pool of knowledge anyway?
And, hey, maybe if he's a super genious he might get as far as figuring out how a pointed stick works.
"Think of it this way: if those companies weren't guaranteed profit in case of discovering something useful, they wouldn't do the research in the first place."
Except, of course, they're not guaranteed the profit for the research, they're guaranteed the profit from having a monopoly. Which essentially means their incentive is to get as much profit out of the monopoly as possible (ie, a huge incentive for marketing) while investing the bare minimum necessary to gain another monopoly into research.
And, of course, ignoring the fact that if we didnt grant those monopolies could very well be spending the money now going to the pharmas directly on research instead, thus getting more than five times the R&D done for the same amount of money we spend on medicines today.
Depends on the patent system. IIRC, the system in India specifically only granted the patent on the specific process to make the compound, which let generics manufacturers develop different methods of synthesis and produce the same compound. While, again, if I remember correctly, other countries granted the patent on the method by which the specific compound worked, essentially meaning the medicine itself is patented.
"40GB hard drive in it, which immediately makes it a couple of years"
You overestimate the shite the bigname vendors put in their entry level systems. A low end HP 'server' can ship with an 80GB drive today, I wouldnt be surprised if 40GB drives were still shipping a few months ago.
The fact that they're actually selling machines with components that have been rare in retail for quite some time makes one wonder where they're getting the parts. Refurbished junk, perhaps? Guess that would be good for the margin.
"you won't be able to get the parts to turn a dead box back into a live one"
Yes, well, another reason to avoid 'brand name' boxes like the plague and buy standard components.
"Go look up the term "fascist.""
Ok. Here's the wikipedia description: "the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, corporatism, anti-liberalism, and anti-communism."
You were saying?
"we were part of the solution the last time such REAL nasty people took over Europe"
Most of the solution the last time were the Soviet communists under Stalin. Does that make the communists 'good', or that Europe should ignore the rest of what Stalin did?
The sad thing is that it'll be hard to find someone to free the Americans when they need help getting liberated.
Compare Fedora with the Ubuntu minor releases and RHEL (or CentOS) for the major LTS releases.
If you look at jkeatings blog is sounds more like an extension of support time for the FC releases is likely, and those requiring long time support are pointed towards RHEL/CentOS, which probably are better matches for long term needs anyway.
Personally, I'd say the existence of CentOS made the legacy project far less essential.
"They're barely computer literate as it is,"
All the more reason to put them on Linux.
Really, the barely computer literate arent a problem, and they become far easier to support on Linux. It's the 'think they know what they're doing' people who are a pain as they'll be upset when they cant break their systems in the same way they used to.
Of course, they'd come complaining to you when they borked their system in XP too, so as a supporting relative you're almost always better off with the family on Linux (with the possible exception being when you have a competent Windows admin in the family who'll be doing the support (lucky guy...)).
Good point. We need to combine this with a law requireing any occupants of the car beside the driver to be bound and gagged to ensure a distraction free environment.
There is lots of empirical evidence. Google on "cell phone drunk", and you'll find a host of studies ranging cell phone use (both with and without handsfree) while driving about as dangerous as driving drunk.
A better explanation, of course, is that he's a sock puppet. That fits the rest even better, without resorting to Bush doing a brilliant portrayal of stupid.
"car thieves"
You must mean 'car copiers'. Of course, I have yet to see a car alarm system prevent unauthorized copying of a car.
But you can bet that if the gas station had not only a car washer but also a car copier we'd see the car industry yelling about how car copying was going to kill the industry and how cars would have to be protected from copying, and find a whole host of reasons why cars had to cost $20K+ even tho the car copier could churn out copies the whole day long for a couple of bucks worth of raw matter...
As for the issue of cost of producing the first copy, _deal_ with it. The opensource community (and other highly competetive industries) has already shown how you do it; quit it with the multi-billion dollar sink-or-swim projects, release rapid incremental changes where you recuperate investment from your first mover advantage. The days where you locked yourself in your room for ten years and came out with something great are over and gone. By the time you're finished the small daily steps of the world will have left your solitary development a decade behind in the dust; collaborative interchange is vastly more powerful than the ivory tower.
"worthless data?"
As the advertizers have to pay someone to make you view it, and as people pay for, or go to extreme lengths to avoid viewing it, the data can actually be considered negative value, rather than worthless, data.
As such, all advertizing money should be subtracted from GDP reporting. Maybe then we can finally get rid of it.
"they give a monopoly on ONE way to cure the disease."
Depending on the breadth of the patent. In the cases where there are multiple routes of attack, while there may be legitimate reasons (as per side effects, etc) to develop a multitude of alternate treatments, it is not necessarily the best way to spend R&D money to have fifteen ways to cure a particular popular disease rather than five good ways to cure that disease and five ways each for two others. As you mention (better?) in paranthesis I suppose you see that.
"Developing a new drug costs around $1Bn and takes close to 10 years."
Under the current market construct. A competetive market driven system would quite likely lower those costs by a large margin. Monopoly protection is incomparably good at creating huge costs (costs tend to rise to fill available capital); compare the costs of production and development in other protected sectors ranging from Soviet state factories through open source versus proprietary software.
"not that you specify any"
Ok, here's a few quick variations (with their own drawbacks) off the top of my head:
Mandatory licensing. Any and all competitors may license a particular development at the same price (as company internal production), essentially separating R&D and marketing, administration and manufacturing into a separate competetive area.
R&D recovery caps; patents are limited in recuperative amount to for example a minimum fixed sum or scale like 1.5-2 times R&D investment. After that they expire.
Joint financed R as the insurance companies and/or other social financing systems are the ones paying five times the cost of the R&D for the medicines, they'd save huge amounts of money simply financing the R&D themselves and licensing the production to generics producers.
Etc. You're free to invent even more systems; the trick is to concentrate on the purpose: to maximize efficiency and tie the rewards to the _R&D_, while not creating a protected economic sector.
"that drug companies are murderers if they don't give away their products"
It would be more appropriate for the WTO lobbyists and those pushing the current system. There's an overlap, and the pharmas are strongly tied to those lobbying efforts, but a blanket blame may be an oversimplification.