Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
I have quite a few. I don’t believe in copyright laws or IP in general. I think it holds back innovation and exists solely to benefit megacorps like Disney or pharmaceutical companies.
For example - you develop a new drug that really helps some people. You charge $50 a pill even though it costs you $5 to produce. Without the government protecting IP, another company will come around and produce it and sell it for $6 a pill, providing cheaper access to healthcare.
People will say “what would give someone the incentive to make new things?” Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades… one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.
Another unpopular opinion is I’m pretty absolutist with free speech. I think certain things like calls to violence or intentional defamation of character should be restricted. But pretty much everything else should be fair game.
I believe in open borders and think the US should return to the late 1800s style of immigration. We’re gonna need the population to compete with China in the coming century.
I also think that the primary investment into climate change at this point should be preparing for the inevitable changes instead of trying to prevent the inevitable.
I disagree with your view on IP, at least for pharmaceuticals. For most drugs, the exclusivity period is only 5 years, after which generic companies reverse engineer the product with ease and create a low-cost alternative. Without this period allowing pharma companies to make their money, there’d be no reason to invest the billions upon billions of dollars into R&D to discover and develop the drug in the first place. Most drug candidates fail, and the wins are what prop up the whole industry.
I’m not defending price gouging and I think all governments should control pricing, preferably with a single payer system (looking at you USA), but we would be so much further behind without patent protection. Especially for orphan diseases.
Don’t really agree with you on IP for most creative purposes either. There should be a reasonable length of time you get exclusive rights to something you create. But this doesn’t excuse Disney’s stranglehold on the mouse.
Yeah with pharma in particular you need that initial profitability, as you say.
Additionally…
This doesn’t really make sense. Shenzen company’s might have copied products developed by other companies, but surely you still need another company to invest the R & D initially in order to have something to copy.
Consumer products don’t “evolve”. Developing and producing are two different processes. If there’s no IP then there’s only an incentive to produce things, and no incentive to develop them. I think this is especially true of pharmaceuticals given that there’s no incremental / evolutionary pathway to discovering new drugs and the costs of conducting trials et cetera is preclusive.
Developing new drugs costs millions and can lasts decades, especially because of clinical trials. Without IP protection, the company making the effort to find new drugs would go bankrupt (the price of newly found drugs must also pay for other drug research that did not succeed). I don’t know how it works in the USA, in France the system is that that the IP protection lasts 10 years after releasing the drug on the market, then other companies can copy it. And during this 10 years period, the price is regulated by the government.
This is why pharma shouldn’t be for-profit, it needs to be socialized for the good of everyone.
How does a patent hold back innovation? Producing the same good isn’t creating something new.
I can agree that overly broad patents are unacceptable. Ie “something but on a computer”.
I agree with all but the last, which I don’t completely disagree with, I just don’t think it should be the majority yet either.
IP has many many flaws, have to disagree with you on the r&d though. That simply costs upfront money and we don’t do a lot of it anymore anyways.
To some degree companies don’t even patent their stuff, so that they don’t have to publish the inner workings for their competitors. This is especially a problem with china since they pretty notoriously don’t give a damn about patents and just copy it anyway. Your Shenzhen example makes no sense to me.
There is enough about ip to dislike anyways:
It is mainly used as a way to sue each other in the corporate world. This is why they patent everything usually.
Patents don’t even really have to explain how the technique works (or if it really works) in much detail.
there is little to no recourse if the patent office does not want to grant your patent. On the other hand if they feel like it, they can grant complete shit.
patents are prohibitively expensive for private people, in granting and upkeep.
You have to keep some kind of a compensation mechanism in place that guarantees worldly rewards to inventors, researchers or creators for innovation or art. Otherwise why would they work?
Intellectual “ownership”, as ridiculously bullshit as it currently sounds, is the mechanism in place currently. Is there anything else you can suggest?