- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
Im saying that the companies who currently own the IP didn’t in fact pay for the development. They paid for the exclusive rights. Universities discovered and developed the new drugs, and then, since universities don’t run large pharmaceutical factories, they sell that developed drug to a company to manufacture it at scale in exchange for the sole rights to be the manufacturer. The system as it stands is not like taxes, because taxes are FOR something. If we stopped giving patents to Pfizer we wouldn’t stop having medicine or even stop having new medical breakthroughs, we would simply no longer have to pay $600 for a Tylenol in the hospital.
I’m glad you added that you aren’t advocating for this, but this system isn’t ingrained into society. It was created, and shaped this way by the companies which own the ip and benefit from nobody being able to manufacture their own cheaper versions. The result of dismantling the medical ip system would not result in zero medicine being manufactured it would result in hundreds of thousands of individual small pharmacies producing their own drugs for nearly no cost. The IP rights exist to protect entrenched capital at the very top of the market. This does not protect anyone but the rights holders and hurts everyone else by further increasing the barriers to access for the majority of the planet.
A billion dollar company has convinced you that if they don’t hold exclusive rights to manufacture lifesaving medications they did not develop then all of medical research would cease. That is hilariously false.