Topic: Read this before having an opinion on economics - page 9. (Read 25890 times)

When I laugh about the government doing the research I'm more laughing at it from the "less government is good" perspective not that it might be the best answer.
The government can (and does) take a loss all the time where private companies wouldn't. If something affects 1 in 1000000 people the government could lose money researching it while the private pharms might ignore it. Obviously this is good and bad. If they handled the research then we might have better antibiotics but no viagra. So I guess you'd be guaranteed to get old and not enjoy it.

When I laugh about the government doing the research I'm more laughing at it from the "less government is good" perspective not that it might be the best answer.
The government can (and does) take a loss all the time where private companies wouldn't. If something affects 1 in 1000000 people the government could lose money researching it while the private pharms might ignore it. Obviously this is good and bad. If they handled the research then we might have better antibiotics but no viagra. So I guess you'd be guaranteed to get old and not enjoy it.

Except in the case we're discussing where it doesn't lead to profit making opportunities. At least not for the ones doing the research. They just have costs.

Who would fund the start ups? It wouldn't be anyone who expected to make money from the investment. Especially since big pharma is now pooled together and have all the infrastructure in place to copy your invention.

Work is work, regardless if you use muscles or brain. If you have to compensate me for my physical work, you should for intellectual work too.

Why should research be profitable? Research generally leads to profit making opportunities. That's why it's risky.

Start ups are no longer restricted by IP laws and can thus enter the market more easily, without having to worry about being sued into oblivion by the larger players for patents they may or may not have violated. More opportunity to means more players means more competition.

Your conclusion is that "intellectual work needs to be protected". What are your premises, and the steps that take you from those premises to the conclusion?

Why do research at all? Why be in a pool? There's no profit in research anymore, or not enough to justify it.

And how have you increased competition by pushing large pharma together into a large pool?

I agree that IP law should be reformed. But in some way intellectual work needs to be protected.

I'm not saying you should have to do the research. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. The large entities will most likely find it in their interest to pool resources for research. If non-participation is beneficial to smaller entities, they will grow and participate in the research pool. If not, then we've replaced a coercive IP system with one of a voluntary nature and there is no difference in market function. In addition to that we've lowered the barriers to entry to the pharmaceutical market and increased competition.

Maybe we could let the government do all the research ......haha was a joke.....

The point is that I don't want to do the research. I just want the end result, a working drug, and without IP I can have it. I can just pick it up at the pharmacy. It's hard to fail in reverse engineering. And why would I want to pool resources? I don't want to do research. That shit's expensive. And even if I do, just because I'm such a good guy, there will always be another VC who'll see the opportunity to make money from someone elses research.

wouldn't there always be people that didn't want to participate in the research and just reap the rewards of the other groups work?

The point is that I don't want to do the research. I just want the end result, a working drug, and without IP I can have it. I can just pick it up at the pharmacy. It's hard to fail in reverse engineering. And why would I want to pool resources? I don't want to do research. That shit's expensive. And even if I do, just because I'm such a good guy, there will always be another VC who'll see the opportunity to make money from someone elses research.

Sure, it's always a possibility, but imagine if all of the big players pooled their resources for research like this. Let's say that your startup is profitable because you successfully engaged in corporate espionage or reverse engineering. You're not always going to be successful, and now that you have lots of extra capital, the smarter move is to pool your resources with the rest. Perhaps if you don't join them, they will put pressure on you to do so, by refusing to cooperate with you as an outside profit seeking entity.

Why should a smart venture capitalist pay for something he can get for free? As an even smarter venture capitalist I wait, pick up a few chemists with the proper education, build my factory and can still undercut the lot of them. After all, they all have costs that I don't.  Copying is easy. Reseach is hard.

Luckily, you're a smart venture capitalist, and you knew in advance there is no IP law. To that end, you had a meeting with Generica and the other pharmaceutical firms that could match your output. In return for access to all your research, you received additional funding, and a voluntarily entered into contractual agreement for 1 year monopoly rights (in return for doing the brunt of the research). Everybody wins.

Quote: "I'm really torn on this. I'm more on the libertarian side but I just don't see the motivation to write a book / make a movie / program if I know that everyone is going to bittorent my file and I'll actually lose money writing it. Not saying that should stop me from making it or the end result would justify IP laws or not. I'm just saying I wouldn't want to go in to a project knowing I'll lose money due to copying."

It is maybe a pity actually that most likely this would *not* prevent profit-motivated works of literature and art, leaving the field to those who do the art for the art's sake.

Advertisers would probably still produce movies glorifying their products, military-fancying regimes still produce movies glorifying war and combat, and so on.

It is maybe bad enough that some things get glorified, that propaganda is so rife and pervasive, without making its production worse than cost free but actually directly profitable!

(One might have to weave the product or "philosophy" more tightly into the plot instead of simply placing one's products as non-essential props in non-essential scenes, which might inspire one to employ imaginative script or screenplay writers...)

-MarkM- (Just a quick try at a counterexample off the top of my head, maybe full of holes...)

Generica company buys a few pills, reverse engineer them, builds a similar factory for 100 million, and goes to market with the same product, at 1/10th the price, 6 months later. In that time I've managed to make a 100 million dollar profit then I must slash my prices to sell anything at all, my investors won't get their money back for a very long time, if ever.

How can I convince my investors to invest in my new idea to cure Alzheimers? Why should they not wait and invest in Generica company instead.

“Intellectual property rights are rights in ideal objects,
which are distinguished from the material substrata in
which they are instantiated.”

One reason for the undue stress placed on creation as the source of property rights may be the focus by some on labor as the means to homestead unowned resources. This is manifest in the argument that one homesteads unowned property with which one mixes one’s labor because one “owns” one’s labor. However, as Palmer correctly points out, “occupancy, not labor, is the act by which external things become property.” By focusing on first occupancy, rather than on labor, as the key to homesteading, there is no need to place creation as the fount of property rights, as Objectivists and others do. Instead, property rights must be recognized in first-comers (or their contractual transferees) in order to avoid the omnipresent problem of conflict over scarce resources. Creation itself is neither necessary nor sufficient to gain rights in unowned resources. Further, there is no need to maintain the strange view that one “owns” one’s labor in order to own things one first occupies. Labor is a type of action, and action is not ownable; rather, it is the way that some tangible things (e.g., bodies) act in the world.

The problem with the natural rights defense of IP, then, lies in the argument that because an author-inventor “creates” some “thing,” he is “thus” entitled to own it. The argument begs the question by assuming that the ideal object is ownable in the first place; once this is granted, it seems natural that the “creator” of this piece of property is the natural and proper owner of it. However, ideal objects are not ownable.

Under the libertarian approach, when there is a scarce (ownable) resource, we identify its owner by determining who its first occupier is. In the case of “created” goods (i.e., sculptures, farms, etc.), it can sometimes be assumed that the creator is also the first occupier by virtue of the gathering of raw materials and the very act of creation (imposing a pattern on the matter, fashioning it into an artifact, and the like). But it is not creation per se that gives rise to ownership, as pointed out above. For similar reasons, the Lockean idea of “mixing labor” with a scarce resource is relevant only because it indicates that the user has possessed the property (for property must be possessed in order to be labored upon). It is not because the labor must be rewarded, nor because we “own” labor and “therefore” its fruits. In other words, creation and labor-mixing indicate when one has occupied—and, thus, homesteaded—unowned scarce resources.

So, in your world, void o IP-law explain this to me:

I have an idea on how to cure Parkinsons disease. I convince a few of my friends who happen to be very rich to invest in my company, naturally they expect some return from this investment. I then build a lab, hire the right people, and eventually succeed in finding the cure. I then test it to make sure it's safe and get it approved for the market. All in all it's been quite cheap to find this cure and only 900 million dollars have been spent so far. I then spend another 100 million to build a factory that can manufacture the drug.
Then we start selling the drug.
Generica company buys a few pills, reverse engineer them, builds a similar factory for 100 million, and goes to market with the same product, at 1/10th the price, 6 months later. In that time I've managed to make a 100 million dollar profit then I must slash my prices to sell anything at all, my investors won't get their money back for a very long time, if ever.

How can I convince my investors to invest in my new idea to cure Alzheimers? Why should they not wait and invest in Generica company instead.