Debate discussion: intellectual property in an AC land

[almostbusto]

[ QUOTE ]
I agree 100%. The means to discover ideas are very very scarce. De-incentivizing the intellectual capital makes those resources even more scarce. This results in less ideas being discovered. That's a little over-simplified, and some of the ACists will still dispute the utility of IP. WRT to scarcity, I don't particularly care whether the ideas themselves are non-scarce. But I'm a utilitarian. You'll get a lot of "So?" comments from moral ACists.

[/ QUOTE ]

it sound likes you accepting a welfare loss? is this correct? meaning you are reducing the incentive for discovering ideas below its optimal level.

why would you knowingly want this? this results in a net welfare loss which is the metric by which policies are judge as a utilitarian.

[Poofler]

<--Not an ACist

[almostbusto]

[ QUOTE ]
<--Not an ACist

[/ QUOTE ]

oh sorry [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]
I guess i should have been tipped off when you said you were a utilitarian. those frameworks are so intertwined though, the underlying thesis of libertarian thought is that markets maximize welfare, making them utilitarians.

well hopefully a self-described ACist can jump in and answer my questions.

[ShakeZula06]

[ QUOTE ]
meaning you are reducing the incentive for discovering ideas below its optimal level.


[/ QUOTE ]
How do you judge what level is optimal?

[almostbusto]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
meaning you are reducing the incentive for discovering ideas below its optimal level.


[/ QUOTE ]
How do you judge what level is optimal?

[/ QUOTE ]

ideally you want to maximize the net benefits resulting from the IP framework. furthermore, you want to make sure the resulting framework is philosophically consistent with some ideal. but that is almost never a problem.


Also, regarding keeping the cure secret. you can't. scientist can reverse engineer just about anything, though at some cost. so you might be saved somewhat if the cost of reverse engineering is very high. of course going in you have no idea what that cost will be since you haven't even invented the compound yet. so that doesn't solve the incentive problem.

[MrWookie]

Shake,

[ QUOTE ]
For one, it can keep it secret.

[/ QUOTE ]

For the most part, this is a fallacy. Any self-respecting analytical chemist should be able deduce the structure of any drug in a fairly short time frame. You stick it in an NMR spectrometer, maybe you enlist the help of a mass spectrometer, a Raman spectrometer, or a number of other structure determination techniques, and bam, you know what the drug is in shockingly little time, and with equipment any self-respecting pharma company already has. Hell, even if you have to crystallize the SOB in order to get a structure, there are some extremely efficient, high-throughput techniques that can do that for you. Next, you enlist a team of organic chemists to hammer out the synthesis, and you're in business. It's almost certain that, once the synthesis is solved, the big pharma will have more efficient and larger scale production process than a small company that actually discovers the drug. If this whole process took months to years time, then conceivably the little guy would be able to get in there, get enough brand recognition, and get the word out so that people choose his product over the copy (Advil vs. Ibuprofen, etc.). However, we're talking weeks to months here for a team dedicated to solving and synthesizing one molecule. That's well within the range of big pharma's large marketing coffers to catch up with. The only strategy for the discoverer would be to stockpile huge quantities of the drug (assuming it's stable for that long) without announcing its existence (and hoping no corporate spies from big pharma caught wind of the clinical trials) until he has enough to sell all at once so as to make sufficient profit before our big guy catches up. At that point, he gives up and finds something new.

In a battle of equally large companies, sure, the one that gets there first will be able to have a secure market advantage, but the incentive for the little guy to enter the market and try to compete with a new drug is minimal.