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0 pointsbassman90007y ago0 comments

That's fine, but what happens to your R&D costs? Is everybody using the product contributing?

Example: a HW company spends millions, if not hundreds of millions, on developing a new chip/board, expecting the investment to be returned on sales. China steals the IP, and starts manufacturing and selling before them. Company loses all investment on R&D.

Example: pharma company spends hundreds of millions developing a new drug, including decade-long, gruesome FDA approval, expecting to return the investment on sales, including China. Someone steals the documents on manufacturing it. China starts producing the generic before the company even obtains permission. China patents the generic there, so chances for sales in a 1.2 billion economy are zero. India probably follows. Why bother then?

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code_duck7y ago

To save lives??

Anyway, in your example the drug is still a monopoly in the US and EU and is likely to be profitable, is it not? Is there an epidemic of pharmaceutical companies going out of business because they can’t assert their IP effectively? Or are they making record profits? But I see your point.

My point is that while sure, that defrays the ability to completely monopolize an innovation, complete monopolization is not necessary to justify invention or development.

For the first example, a company would develop that because they are needed for supercomputers or higher performance for some application. If China wants to make them cheaper, great, it means we can do that application cheaper.

This seems to just be a debate about patents and IP in general. I doubt we can cover much new ground there.

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