Hi whatsthepoint
Well first of all I'd take those "hundreds of millions" with a pinch of salt. Second of all, even if research cost money, they would still be able to make a profit. In fact not all companies even choose to have their product patented in the first place! In some cases making a patent is even a bad business decision! See the thing with patents is, you are allowed exclusive rights for 3 to 5 years depending the product and all, but in return you are to explain your products secrets. In a lot of cases it's more economical to not take a patent at all (don't forget patents are expensive by the way), and just try to sell enough to break even during the period that the competitors try to figure out the exact formula and how to produce it easily in mass numbers. Once the competitors are up to speed the market might get divided, but there's still a profit to be made nevertheless! The cake is just a bit smaller afterwards. But either way, be it with or without patent competition will eventually come, they are even protected by antitrust laws.
It's not just the discovery of the substance that's expensive, its also the development, safety tests, trials on humans etc, so the end costs of an original drug are huge, usually a couple of hundred of millions, sometimes even more.
So suppose a company invests millions in the development of a drug and a rival company happens to discover the formula or gets it say from an employee, spends a couple of millions on clinical tests and starts selling it under a lower price, getting the market advantage. This could cause a lot of companies to stop developing new drugs. And besides, even if there still were competition and creativity, people could still use other people's ideas and gain money, which I personally find wrong.
The development of a new drug is so expensive, that most if not all drugs are patented, and from what I read a drug patent lasts 20 years, I'm not sure whether drug companies have to pay for it and if so how much is it, but I'm sure the potential financial loss due to their drug being stolen is certainly much greater than the cost of the patent.
Other fields of research may do well without the protection of patents, but I don't think the pharmaceutical industry is among them.
What about logos and slogans, do you think a company has the sole right to use its company logo or should those be public property as well?
Well they are doing a great job! In fact the vast majority of advancements in medicine have not been made by multinational corporations, but instead they are made by passionate students, scientists who lost a loved one to a certain disease, dedicated doctors who are sick of all their patients dying, government funding, fund raisers and so on. Sure the big corporations bring a new and advanced version of old medicines every now and then, making it seem like they are a big contributor to advancements. But when you only look at the improvements that really make a difference, corporations only brought a very small percentile of all medicinal advancements.
Medical science and pharmaceutical science are two separate sciences. The development of a new drugs costs millions and is a subject to rigorous laws and limitations, whereas medical and surgical procedures are not.
Governments and NPOs do not develop new drugs, a government can introduce laws to encourage pharmaceutical companies to make the more affordable or develop non-profitable drugs, NPOs can raise money and ship the drugs to Africa. In these days it is impossible to discover a healing substance and develop it into a drug without the backing of a pharmaceutical company.
Well I think I can prove that, and even by three different ways no less!
The first way is trough the difference in creation and discovery. An Idea is an invention, not a creation. A discovery not a manufacturing. Lets take Edison's light bulb for example. Edison might have been the human being to ever think to use wolfram under an electrical current to produce light. However, since long before Edison's birth, wolfram has always had the characteristic to light up when a current goes trough it. Edison did not create that characteristic, he discovered it. This is the same philosophical issue as the tree that falls in wood with no witnesses to hear it fall. Does it create sound waves even if nobody is there to hear it? Yes, of course it does. A fact is no less a fact simply because we fail to acknowledge it. An idea already exists even if nobody has discovered it yet. An idea refers to a nature, refers to something thats is, and could be. But this nature exists independent of us, independent of our advancement. Or to put it in other words, 1+1=2, even before people had the intelligence to count.
The second way to prove that an idea exists independently, is that separate people can come up with the same idea without each other's knowledge. Throughout history we see that isolated cultures ran somewhat parallel and made similar progresses without knowledge of one another. In other words, separate people had the same idea without being connected to one another. This clearly proves ideas are independent and not dependent upon a unique thinker.
Then for the third way to prove that ideas are independent; consider the mental process involved with investing in the development of an idea. What is the purpose of the invested time, energy, research? All these investments are directed to the mind, to alter the mind of the researcher. None of that work actually changes or forms the idea. No, what the work does, is it changes the researchers mind, so that the mind would be better fit to better understand already existing nature and characteristics of things. So none of the investments are directly linked to the idea in the first place. The investment is put purely into the perception and understanding of the researcher so he could discover that what was already there.
Nature does exhibits certain properties I'm not denying that.
But just because wolfram glows under the electric current that doesn't mean the idea of putting wolfram under the electric current existed prior to Edison doing it.
Just because the universe has the potential for something to exists, those things do not necessarily exist as ideas.
Yes, inventions are a result of investigating the natural world, either random or with a specific problem in mind, but that doesn't mean the conclusions exist independently of the mind.
The tree-sound and math analogies are analogies, not really the best ones, sound waves are a physical phenomena, so is addition in a way. Tell me, why do you you think you can deduct these to example to every single idea? And how can you prove your deductions are true?
To answer your second point, the physical laws are the same all over the world, friction works the same, gravity works the same etc. Humans too are pretty much the same, our brain and its capabilities to solve problems are similar in all people, so I don't see it all that strange that separate cultures came to similar solutions when dealing with similar problems. That and the fact that humans, no matter if you're a creationist or an evolutionist, derive from the same area, so certain human ways passed on from the original human or primate society to all the later societies.
And even if ideas exist independently, that doesn't mean people can't claim ownership over their inventions, they were the first to discover the idea, so in a way its technically theirs, like uninhabited land. And for the most part they put a lot of effort in it and IMHO that is a reason enough for their ideas to be protected by law.
Of course you cannot prove either viewpoint, You cannot prove what is by definition. That would be like saying "You cannot prove red!", or "You cannot prove 24". There is nothing to be proven there, since there's something missing. However you can prove that this specific apple is red; and that 4 times 6 equals 24. Does intellectual property exist? I cannot and I need not prove that. The very existence of intellectual property is not what is at question here. We can however prove whether or not it is ethical, social, humane, beneficent, logical and so on.
I don't think we can prove whether it is ethical or logical, as I believe these two categories aren't absolute (you can prove the opposite if you want), but we can argue about benefits to the society or the individual, which again leaves us at unprovable premises, that is what matters more, the well-being of the society as a whole or individual rights. It often comes down to this.
Sorry to be so frank with you, but I must say that now you are just being stubborn. Look up the definitions of theft and piracy, and you'll see that linguistically they refer to two different things, hence they have different names. Also, I have shown how semantically speaking that piracy is not even the same process as theft. And then I have also shown how philosophically speaking piracy does not follow under any of the philosophical arguments against theft. So by what claims can you argue that piracy is theft afterall? You admit that you have no grounds to make that claim, and you bring no counter to all my strong arguments that show that piracy is not theft. Yet you say I cannot prove this? What proof do you expect to satisfy your demand? A written confession from the word itself?
What I'm saying is that both material theft and piracy are a subset of theft, so just because the subsets are different they can still belong to the same set.
As I said, piracy deprives the inventor of potential profits and I don't see why this shouldn't be considered a form of theft.
You claim they're abstract, but at the same time you claim ideas exist independently, so why not profits?
