A reply to Henk Storm-Legal protection of inventors is good for society
Hi Henk:
Your philosophy is short sighted. The AIDS medication that you think the world deserves to have for free, consider who invented that medication. It took teams of dozens of people with Ph.D.s many years to invent that medicine. Each of those people makes a giant salary, like $150,000 a year or possibly much more. These people are smart, and I mean really smart. They have worked their tails off all their lives to get where they are. They studied textbooks hard through junior high school, senior high school, undergraduate school, graduate school and finally doctorate school. They have sacrificed their time, energy, and comfort all their lives to stuff in their head the super advanced knowledge that it takes to research at that level. They went without pay until they were 30 years old. They deserve those high salaries. If there were not a big reward, why would anyone make those sacrifices? So the companies that employ them have to pay them a lot of money. The end result is that the company that invented that medicine paid many perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to invent that medicine. And there is no guarantee that the medicine will be successful, many are not. And you are playing with peoples' health, the risk is great that something may go wrong and you my cause injury and be found liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. The company must be able to recoup all of that investment, plus interest paid on the loans required to get that money upfront, plus profit to the many shareholders. If they can't recoup that money, then why bother? And they would go out of business. And then you would have no more medicine that you think is so worthwhile. The ultimate result is that people and companies that invent things make large investments and sacrifices to do so, and they must enjoy legal protections that allow them to reap a large reward and prevent people from stealing the fruits of their hard labor. Failure to protect people and companies in this way will result in people not bothering to go to the huge trouble, risk, and sacrifice required to invent things that the world needs, like AIDS medications.