http://tinyurl.com/9vvsvob

Interesting idea I suppose.

About 50% of the comments seem to be "No, we should just ban ALL 
PATENTS! Because patents are EVIL! All you guys are doing is 
legitimising patents."

Now maybe we don't need software patents. I don't know. But what I *do* 
know is this: The pharmaceutical industry wouldn't exist without patents.

You see, a drug is a bit like a big-budget movie: It costs *billions* of 
dollars to develop and test a drug to the point where it gets licensed 
for use on humans. But once the drug has been invented, it costs about 
0.0003 USD per pill to manufacture the stuff. The *only* reason anyone 
is willing to pay billions of dollars to develop new drugs is that they 
know that if it gets licensed, then for the next X years they can sell 
this stuff for $$$ per pill - i.e., vastly more than what it costs to 
manufacture.

Without patents, a company would spend billions on making a new drug, 
get it licensed, and then every other company on the globe would start 
manufacturing it and selling it for peanuts - because, let's face it, 
they have no design costs to recoup.

Of course, this would not happen - what would *actually* happen is that 
nobody would develop new drugs in the first place. And that would be 
pretty catastrophic.

So what's the alternative? Honestly, I don't know... Perhaps if drug 
licenses were only granted to the company that did all the safety 
testing? That might work?

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