Regarding some recent comments about how patents were 
encouraging medicine to develop and test artificial, 
patentable compounds while ignoring the natural and
safer - but unpatentable - equivalents, I recently wrote:

Drugs, foods and medicine are all showing signs of marching 
off into patent land - while paying little or no attention 
to whether that's where the useful compounds are.

IMO, this medical mess isn't a failure of commerce - it's a 
problem with patent law - which works /against/ free-commerce
by granting government-enforced monopolies.

Patents are effective job-protection for lawyers.  They are 
a primitive attempt at ensuring organisations cooperate -
rather than dissipating their energies fighting each other 
that fails to appreciate reciprocal altruism.  As far as 
directing funds into intellectual endeavours goes, they 
siphon a lot of funds aways from such endeavours and into 
the pockets of lawyers - create lots of pointless work 
either reinventing other ways of performing tasks which have 
been previously invented but patented - or copying ideas and 
then obfuscating them so that the copying cannot be detected 
- and make societies with such laws vulnerable to external 
cheaters: organisations who do not respect patent law, take 
advantage of published, patented inventions - and pay no 
licensing fees to the patent holders.

Ideas and information are practically impossible to publish 
and then defend and protect.

IMO, the notion that ideas and information can be 
simultaneously published and owned is in conflict with the 
ease with which they can be copied, and the practical 
difficulties of enforcing laws against copying them.

One of the effects of such laws is to divert lots of energy 
into making music, movies and fiction.  ISTM that these are 
one of mankind's equivalents of the peacock's tail.
They represent sexual selection run rampant.  The effect of 
runaway sexual selection on species without predators is 
often to make them covered in elaborate ornamentation - but 
over-specialised in particular directions - and unable to 
compete effectively when they encounter predators again.

Governments with laws implicitly promoting substantial 
expenditure on such activity by offering monopolies to the 
vendors need to think clearly about what they are doing.
Is such activity really serving their interests?  What are
the current goals - and how do such activities serve them?
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 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
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