Are patents good or bad?

[quimcunx]

Patent is fine for many things but I think medications should not be under the control of profit making entities but government funded and not patented. Patients governments between them fund the research anyway as we buy the succesful drugs from pharmas, giving them the profit to research more new products. some things are too important to be privatised.

Never going to happen but it's my opinion anyway.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

But on the other hand, there are lots of pharmaceutical companies that are examining traditional remedies in countries like India and China, looking for the active ingredients and looking to patent their findings.

Not just traditional remedies. The new seeds for staple crops such as rice, which are patented so that farmers have to buy new ones every year, have been developed from strains that have been developed for millennia by the ancestors of those same farmers. Were they paid a penny for the original strains from which the patented ones were made? Were they fuck.

 

[Gmart]

I thought i would bump this thread because I saw vid on youtube, which puts forward the problems with patents, esp patents of natural life in comparison to patents as an incentive to innovate (two completely different things).

 

[dylanredefined]

Got no problem with a patent for something you invent be it a i pod or a new drug .Patenting something like a dna strand no and software might be problamatic .