We thought that too. Tracking music plays on private devices is _hard_ to do, so we proposed the next best thing.

Instead of paying corporations millions to film in a state for a few weeks, we could turn those subsidies to local creatives. Each state could run a bittorrent server and download site (or streaming site) and track the downloads. Then divvy up the funds by plays, and you now have income in line with actual consumption.

But no… instead you “creatives” whine about Amazon “boycotting” your publishers (rather, discontinuing pre-orders during negotiations). You go whining on twitter. We offer Mincome so you could be free to make stuff without worrying about income in the now. You rejected that.

We’re the Pirates. You made your bed. You sleep in it.

By reason or by force is the motto of Chile. We pirates are prepared to be reasonable. But no, you attack us with force.

Goodbye, “creatives” and corporate giants. Hello, sharing culture and mincome.

And there we have it. The statement of a fanatic. There can be no circumstances at all ever which would justify IP protection for such a fanatic. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference if all the facts and arguments were overwhelmingly in favor of such protection. Because IP is INTRINSICALLY evil and such essential evil cannot be compromised with.

The problem with fanatics is of course is that their black and white view of the world doesn’t map well onto the constantly shifting greys that the real world comprises. Hence application areas where compromise is necessary because we just can’t figure out a better way, is nonetheless made impossible. We all have pet fanatics that disturb us. I find this unbridled unreasoning hatred of IP disturbing. Fortunately, it is a position that is so nuts that there isn’t the slightest chance of it constituting a viable policy and changing the real world in its image.

Your understanding of the costs of pharma R&D is beyond appalling. Actual R&D costs are indeed billions. I hope to God nobody swallows this delusion of yours.

I’m all for scientific and technical progress speeding R&D time. And obviously we have indeed made enormous advances in scientific tooling. But if you seriously imagine that medical research is now a hobbyist endeavor that can be undertaken on a shoestring you are truly living in some kind of ideological dreamwork of your own making.”

“No, the R&D is neither expensive nor risky. In fact the majority of development costs are absorbed by the taxpayer since the real expense comes through the clinical trials and studies.”

This makes no sense. First you allege that discovery is cheap, and R&D isn’t expensive or risky then suddenly you bring up a new category = ‘real expense.” This new expense is apparently ‘clinical trials and studies.’ Well what on earth do you imagine R&D covers? And you imagine that this is something undertaken by state funding or charities? Most of such trials and studies are undertaken by privately funded drug companies. Even many trials undertaken at universities are substantially part funded by pharma.

“You couldn’t spend a billion dollars on drug development if you tried.”

Really?
“Over the past generation, the economics of drug development have grown ugly. A U.K. think tank reviewed the literature and concluded that the average cost of developing an approved drug has increased tenfold, jumping from $199 million to $1.9 billion since the 1970s”

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/economists-cite-soaring-costs-behind-average-19b-price-tag-drug-rd/2012-12-03

“a team of lawyers have to pore over every conceivable pre-existing patent which could ban the hypothesized research from taking place. There, by the way, is your “risk”.”

There is a risk here, no question. But the cost of ascertaining it and of licensing IP if necessary is negligible compared with R&D costs. You can hire a team of 100 world class patent attorneys doing nothing else but this kind of work (massive overkill) for around $200m pa. and they could cover every drug you might want to develop.

The sad truth is that it is you who has no handle on the costs. You simply say things you would like to be true based on your ideological position.

Your point about the costs in human lives, notably in the third world, is a good one. I agree that such countries should be allowed extremely favorable licensing terms and should not be priced out of access. But bear in mind that there would not even be any drugs for them to access if there were not privately funded R&D in the first place.

“As I said you claim research actually costs a lot of money – very well, that’s your contention and you believe this should trump ordinary property rights and the free market. The burden of proof falls squarely on you.”

I do claim it costs a lot of money. Because it clear does.

But I don’t see how this implies that trumps ‘ordinary property rights and the free market.’

I have made it abundantly clear that (a) the free market is not something that just ‘works’ to everyone’s advantage all the time (b) hence we have to effect policies to get outcomes we consider socially favorable (c) that is the context in which we should review IP. IP law is only as good or bad as they social results that flow from it. And those results are very hard to characterize across all industries in all circumstances. Sometimes the results are bad (trolls and many software patents) and sometimes they are necessary unless we can come up with something better (pharma). It is naive to think that one size fits all in IP.

Because IP is intrinsically evil the same way sovjet information control or the indulgence sale was. There are some instances of IP which are easily enforceable – ensuring no one sells a product without providing the creator of it a cut, for instance, or recognizing the creator as the origin of a work.

But there is no way to restrict IP to the enforceable and that means IP continually comes into conflict with basic human rights. You can not control information selectively, for instance, so every attempt to cut down on filesharing immediately becomes a question of somehow restricting and surveilling everyone’s communication, all the time.

And even with the easily enforceable, given the recently popular phenomenon of lifehacking and the availability of cheap sequencing tools people can easily manufacture vaccines and medicines in basements at literally no cost whereas the proprietary drug on the market costs more per dose than any resident living in the third world can afford.

Ironically a number of third world nations, not wishing to see large parts of their population die because there was no access to an expensive over-the-counter drug have resorted to “enforced licensing” in many cases – piracy, as you will, done on a national scale. IP, even in it’s most basic of forms, has overreached to the point where even the G20 is finding it hard going to justify the cost in lives and human rights to maintain the rules.

Everything has some sort of benefit. Where IP is concerned that, today, is like looking at Auschwitz and saying that “Well, at least the gold fillings provided fiscal relief for the state as a whole”.

One only needs to look at the death toll due to easily treated diseases in africa to realize you could drop a thousand concentration camps into the deaths caused by medical IP enforcement without making the statistics budge by whole percentages.