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[Leafsnail]

Edit: Also, I'm not sure we want private compagnies investing this much into these topics. Especially healthcare and food sources are problematic, since "Corruption" is widespread. Corporate funded researches have been shown to have 75% positive results*, while that number is below 50% on governement/ independent researches.

*Product works, no side effects, stuff like that

Bad Pharma's been a pretty good read so far, noting how they manage to bury negative results and the like.

I'd rather have goverments being forced to invest large chunks of their GDP by law on R+D

A thousand times this.  If a creative industry really needs money to keep functioning I'd rather give it that money than create horrible copyright/ patent laws that lead to people dying.  I mean we're just destroying value here.

[lorb]

Source please?

I have no source at hand for the higher rate of positive results in private research, but if you are willing to trust a random stranger on the internet who claims he has read that in a reliabable source I'll tell you that I have.

But for the general case: there are studies that show that especially in the field of biomedicine, less governmental funding and increased/extended usability of patents did cripple the overall output of life-saving innovations: Source
So shortening the span patents are valid, or decreasing the amount of things that can be patented actually _helps_ innovation.

[GlyphGryph]

Patents have a strong incentive effect, but ALSO have a strong inhibition effect on research. It's a hard problem. The best solution seems to be (relative) short patents that are still long enough to result in a decent average return over the lifetime of production, while also being fairly narrow in their interpretation and enforcement.

But that's a balance that is hard to get right when we are so intent on letting the foxes run the chicken coop.

[lorb]

Don't forget that government financed research also is a solution: it needs no patent incentive. (Or at least less than in the private sector. Universities do make money from patents atm)

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Patents have a strong incentive effect, but ALSO have a strong inhibition effect on research. It's a hard problem. The best solution seems to be (relative) short patents that are still long enough to result in a decent average return over the lifetime of production, while also being fairly narrow in their interpretation and enforcement.

Which was how patents and copyrights started out, and it worked well. Now these things are so long lasting that it doesn't even pretend to be about innovation. Copyright especially so, since they last after the creator is dead, which is kind of a silly way of convincing them to make more works.

[Reelya]

Edit: Also, I'm not sure we want private compagnies investing this much into these topics. Especially healthcare and food sources are problematic, since "Corruption" is widespread. Corporate funded researches have been shown to have 75% positive results*, while that number is below 50% on governement/ independent researches.

*Product works, no side effects, stuff like that

That's interesting, but could be related to the sheer amount of "new" drugs made by corporations which have the same active region (therefore known side-effects), but they attach it to any one of millions of known "inert" compounds, making it technically a "new" molecule. Then they can apply for a fresh patent as a whole new drug, or get around someone else's patent. It's a lot more lucrative doing things this way, and often the rearranged drugs are marketed as a completely "new" drug. Even though it's no better (but no worse) than what you were already taking.

It's often left up to the public sector to do the basic research (with the corporations scouring the data afterwards for low-hanging fruit) or study the stuff that's not a clear immediate winner. But it's the stuff that's novel or unexpected where the biggest gains often come from, although you're going to hit more potholes too.

[Twi]

Can't blame them for that.

Being a semi-active reader of a blog of a pharmaceutical chemist ( this guy, Derek Lowe), I think I can safely conclude one thing.

Making new drugs is REALLY, REALLY hard. You spend a lot of time and money, and often end up with nothing to show for it but a lot of tests. Making knockoffs is significantly easier. Of course, it won't make you ultra-rich, but it will give you money. And it looks a lot better to investors than the risks of new drug development, no?

[scriver]

Well, if it was not in the contract, then we got a problem.

But I'm spilt on the general issue: the only way to get private companies to invest in better germplasm is to have patents on them. Like patents for new drugs.

There were also the many cases in India where farmers were promised the seeds would be more resistant to weather and insects. Then came the bugs and devasted the fields. So yeah, that private research isn't always the best except for the company itself.

[Helgoland]

Well, if it was not in the contract, then we got a problem.

But I'm spilt on the general issue: the only way to get private companies to invest in better germplasm is to have patents on them. Like patents for new drugs.

There were also the many cases in India where farmers were promised the seeds would be more resistant to weather and insects. Then came the bugs and devasted the fields. So yeah, that private research isn't always the best except for the company itself.

That's not exactly an argument against private research; your point might still be valid, though.

[Leafsnail]

Which was how patents and copyrights started out, and it worked well. Now these things are so long lasting that it doesn't even pretend to be about innovation. Copyright especially so, since they last after the creator is dead, which is kind of a silly way of convincing them to make more works.

I can see an argument for allowing copyright to last a bit of time after the author's death - otherwise an author falling dead soon after signing a contract could seriously harm a publisher.  But it really doesn't need to be decades and decades.

[FearfulJesuit]

Yeah. What about...oh, a decade after the death of the author?

That seems like it would work. It allows some leeway for "oh, but it only became famous right after he died," it acts as life insurance for the kids (which is not a bad thing), and it's really not that long.

[Leafsnail]

Only a very small minority of books still make decent money after a decade too.  And the kind that do would be nice to have in the public domain really.

[Descan]

Why not just decouple it from the author entirely? 20 years, dead or alive. Maybe even less.

[Nadaka]

Why not just decouple it from the author entirely? 20 years, dead or alive. Maybe even less.

Because that would be simple, rational, and benefit all mankind. The only allowable copyright reform is to make is increasingly destructive to the public good. 

[JoshuaFH]

Why not just decouple it from the author entirely? 20 years, dead or alive. Maybe even less.

Because that would be simple, rational, and benefit all mankind. The only allowable copyright reform is to make is increasingly destructive to the public good. 

I just think there's some form of bureaucratic or political aversion to making things simpler. I'm not big into how things work, but there never seems be be something along the lines of "Just scrap what we're doing right now and do it again from scratch", instead it's just tacking more things ontop of eachother until it's a labyrinthine mess whose original intentions are obfuscated by generation after generation of tinkering and revisions.