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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Yes, but only once the drug is off-patent. ~20 years.
IP law is a plague upon the pharmaceutical industry. It doesn't just inflate prices, but it stifles research as groups feel they have to try to avoid each other's parents. Sometimes scientific decisions are justified due to IP rights rather than scientific data. You'd be angered by how often this happens.
And sometimes it takes way longer than that.
There's even a controversy about whether Google's PageRank algorithm was intentionally developed as a worse version of (future) Baidu's RankDex so they could patent it. The fact that there's any scientific advancement at all under capitalism and the patent system is frankly a miracle.