Slated | You can run, but you can't hide

A Universal Alternative to Patents

Thu, 16/07/2009 - 10:57pm — Homer

Scenario: Millions of people are suffering from [some arbitrary disease], most of whom are poor people living in the Third World. A pharmaceutical company spends billions on R&D to find a cure, and eventually makes a breakthrough. The company calculates that, in order to recover its investment, and make a reasonable profit, it must guarantee the sale of X number of units of the drug, at Y cost per unit - anything less, and they cannot justify the investment. However, this necessity presents two problems:

a) The price (Y) is prohibitively high for Third World patients
b) The company must use the exclusivity of patents to ensure sufficient sales (X), so cheaper alternatives cannot be made available to the poor by other companies

Intellectual Monopoly: The Origin of the Pieces

Thu, 16/07/2009 - 2:07am — Homer

The Myth Of Original Creators | Techdirt

The "Right" to Own Knowledge
by Slated - Jul 13th, 2009 @ 9:12pm

@Anonymous Coward - Jul 4th, 2009 @ 3:22pm

Reed: "There are no original works made by individuals in a vacuum is my point. This does go against the way you define "original" because it does not really exist in my mind."

Anonymous Coward: "This is a really amazingly extreme viewpoint to me"

I'm sure.

Equally, it could be argued that your viewpoint is extreme, since it supports the notion that originality is defined as mere contribution to accreted works, and thus justifies exclusive ownership and control by those new contributors, denying both attribution and right of access (and/or other rights) to earlier contributors.