Thread: Is it okay for a student with limited financial resources to pirate software?
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geohsia is offline geohsia
2010-09-27 , 16:16
Posts: 515 | Thanked: 259 times | Joined on Jan 2010
#198
Originally Posted by Sopwith View Post
The drug example that you give is a good way to show how the current system is broken, just change cancer with some common infectious disease. Generic drugs cost very little to produce, yet many millions go into the research of the original. If we don't protect the IP, the company who did the research doesn't get a return on their investment. If we do, millions of children die.
Round and round we go.

Drug companies routine license drugs for the third world so that it can be sold more cheaply in other markets.

The bigger question that will be debated though, is once you stop protecting IP, will that hinder competition and innovation. Newspapers used to be huge, but now that its free and anyone can get access to it anywhere, newspapers are a dying breed. If drug companies can't make millions, will they still try to innovate and spend the hundreds of millions / billions to bring a drug to market only to be sold out by another multinational that can crank out drugs faster and cheaper because they didn't have to do research?