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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Until the fairly recent proliferation of trade agreements that are negotiated out of the view of the public, the investor relations and patent/copyright clauses that prevented the sharing of medical information were not common and were routinely broken by most developing nations. The business community's wishes had no power there, and quite arguably when it comes to medicine, it is a crime against the people to withhold lifesaving information.

In fact, until the US became top dog in the post-war era, we pirated everything we could from England, especially industrial know-how so that we could promote our own development. It is only after we reached hegemonic status that we started enforcing these ludicrous agreements in order to preserve our own businesses' position.

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This is a gross misunderstanding of what patent and copyright actually mean - specifically, they exist to encourage sharing of information, not secrecy. They require full disclosure by definition, so you can't patent a trade secret without revealing it to everyone. There's a period of exclusivity (~20 years), which is very different from "withholding information", but that's only after the IP has been published.

They exist to encourage sharing of information in the context of a private marketplace. Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results. If anything, competition would be better if there were no patents. If employers could simply poach key employees by offering good salaries, they would get that information quite easily.

> Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results.

This is another gross oversimplification at best, and I have yet to hear anyone who has spent significant amounts of time in either public or private sector R&D make such a claim. Real life, and product development in particular, is not so easily reduced to catchy political slogans.

Off top of head, the recent Ebola vaccine was created almost exclusively from gov. research. Merck bought a company who was supposed to commercialize it but they did a really poor job . There are people who would not be dead if the vaccine had been available, sooner

That's an anecdote, not data. The last article I read about this calculated that around 20% of new drug approvals came directly from government/academic research - and that's usually repurposed older drugs (which is actually a good place to focus, since it's cheaper and big pharma isn't really interested in resurrecting off-patent molecules).

Point to nearly anything that has dramatically changed modern life and you will see the arm of the state involved: GPS, internet, the airplane, etc. The best argument I'm aware of for private enterprise producing really novel products is Bell Research, however they were a regulated monopoly, not a competitive industry and the state authorized 10% additional charges for investment.

You can make some arguments about things like iPhones but that device depended on a huge state funded or regulated infrastructure to be useful (e.g. cell towers, internet), and it was essentially a very polished cobbling together of different components (microchips, batteries) that were developed from many decades of state supported / regulated monopoly research.

Business is very good at taking something off the shelf and making money with it. It's very bad at sustained investment that might not be profitable more than a few years away.

If you think Apple simply "took something off the shelf" and sold us iPhones at huge markups, you clearly know even less about R&D than I assumed. Cherry-picking examples like the Internet doesn't really prove your point: try comparing the amount of taxpayer-funded R&D that went into the early (pre-1994) Internet with the amount of private investment since then. (I have no idea what the actual numbers are but I'd guess at least two orders of magnitude difference based on what I've seen elsewhere.)

I don't disagree, but research money spent may be a poor proxy for technical progress if it's spent to research ever better ways of showing ads to consumers.

I mean, it'd make sense if the government research spending aligned with public interest more closely than private investment did, the government is spending the public's money after all.

Totally valid points - but this is why oversimplifying the entire issue into "Private sector bad! Public sector good!" (or vice-versa) is a terrible idea. However, oversimplifying what big companies like Apple do as pushing ads is just as bad. Think about the supply chains involved in building an iPhone, and how the individual components are manufactured - it's decades beyond the roots in government (and remember, projects like the Internet still depended on private companies to actually build most of the hardware).

You are misunderstanding the matter of patents. Modern patents exist precisely because of the inevitability of industrial espionage, which is largely practiced by all developed countries. The goal is that, even after a trade secret is stolen, it will be made useless because nobody can use that information. So the goal is not to "share knowledge", but to avoid the practical use of knowledge that was shared by any means.

Also, you are mistaken in thinking that, by publishing a patent, the company is sharing knowledge. Quite the contrary, the contents of a patent gives only the minimum necessary to protect a crucial aspect of a business secret. Most patents are opaque and don't give any concrete business information that be used to successfully replicate what it is trying to conceal.

In the USA, patents are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and the purpose is to incentivize disclosure, not because the founders were worried about industrial espionage. It would have been awfully difficult for hostile powers to remotely hack our R&D facilities in 1789.

Think again. Hacking is a very old activity; it was not done with computers in 1789, but you can be sure that there was a lot of industrial espionage between Britain and the US at that time.

There is the story of the clove tree, which was monopolized by Dutch East India company, until 1 tree was stolen and seeded elsewhere

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