Patent have reasonable terms. They will have a 20 year head start and then everyone will be competing with them. It's something that will be free in the same lifetime as the researchers, most likely. It's not abusive like current copyright that locks ideas for two generations.
Just to be clear: you're arguing that it's actually a good thing to deliberately slow down application of a revolutionary technology, so that people can make money?
yes, the time frame is limited enough that people can have an incentive to innovate, without being brutally oppressing. we're not locking civilization into the stone age for multiple generations while coros become filthy rich, it's just 20 years and then it's free game for everyone.
now, if it were to death + 75 years, or whatever inane number is copyright today, you'd hear a different story from me. but it is not.
Do you think that having a monopoly on some invention will prevent widespread usage of that invention? Like, "yeah, we invented fully clean carbonless way of making energy for 1% of current prices, but no one will have it"? Currently it just means that the creator of widely usable technology will have some percentage of money for others using his invention instead of others making all the money from his invention while he has a pat on the back.
Yes, I do think that, because that is literally what has happened before.
Companies price their offerings so that the global north will buy it, and the global south will have to pay proportionately extortionate amounts, with no relation whatsoever to the cost of production or research.
Yes, because this is partly why everyone keeps working so hard to produce a revolutionary technology. This is also the way it works with drugs, we have just been through a pandemic and a lot of people made a ton of money over their inventions, rightly so.
The pandemic where governments in the global south were fleeced by pharma companies, while the global north enforced patents and let millions of people die? Which, by the way, is still happening in a lot of poor countries that just don't have the money to afford the vaccines.
Not to mention the fact that the vaccines were developed with public money.
Yeah, the pandemic where rich countries had developed economies capable of producing such vaccines, which they then donated massively to poorer countries [1] or sold to other countries at reduced price. If these companies did not exist, or if they had no profit motive, no one would have had vaccines.
