Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

>> In the end, this would probably mean that only big companies  could file
>> patents. Which also would mean that many of these patents  would be
>> filed about inventions done by others -- others who are too small  to
>> file their own patent, and too small to challenge the resulting patent 
>> filed by the big guy in court. Which IMO would not only render the
>> basic  idea of patents completely useless, but would turn it upside
>> down.
 
> It would to some extent. [...]

> I would not like to abolish patents altogether. Note that without
> patents for instance no new medicine would be invented. No AIDs medicine
> would exist today. 

I'm not sure this would really be a problem. One could argue that the
pharma industry is one of the biggest health problems we have. When you
think about it: most of what doctors know comes from pharma industry R&D
(just as most of what we know comes from electronic industry R&D). But of
course the pharma industry is not primarily interested in creating health
-- in fact, a thoroughly healthy population would be the death of the
industry. This is one of the areas where the capitalist model of
maximization of profit doesn't work very well. 

So I don't think that it's far-fetched to think that if there were less
incentive to invest heavily in drugs (no patents), doctors' knowledge would
be less influenced by pharma industries that primarily want to sell drugs
-- and ever more of them --, and maybe they would be more knowledgeable in
areas that primarily create health (instead of profit).

Gerhard
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