The world would be vastly better without patents in my opinion. Faster innovation, cheaper goods, less environmental waste. Medical technology would be better and cheaper. High technology like MRI machines would become cheaper, health care would become cheaper, etc. Really massive benefits.
It could be that there are certain fields where patents actually help to some degree. In other words an artificial monopoly is the only way to secure enough funds to cross some threshold for viability. Well, fine. We shouldn’t throw out all of the benefits of open innovation just because a few areas will need help. We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care. Then we still get all the benefits of open innovation and we can distort the market with cash injections instead of planet wide distortions on copying.
That's the first sector where research will grind to a halt. It's extremely costly to bring something to the finish line due to regulations. Think drug research where testing and clinical trials take years. But once the molecule has been synthesized, it's trivial to do so at scale. So what smarter players will do is simply wait for someone to spend years on R&D then copy at the finish line and flood the market.
> We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care
So bureaucrats will have even more say in who/what project gets funding. See how wonderful that has been for the EU tech sector.
The world would be vastly better without patents in my opinion. Faster innovation, cheaper goods, less environmental waste. Medical technology would be better and cheaper. High technology like MRI machines would become cheaper, health care would become cheaper, etc. Really massive benefits.
It could be that there are certain fields where patents actually help to some degree. In other words an artificial monopoly is the only way to secure enough funds to cross some threshold for viability. Well, fine. We shouldn’t throw out all of the benefits of open innovation just because a few areas will need help. We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care. Then we still get all the benefits of open innovation and we can distort the market with cash injections instead of planet wide distortions on copying.