Definitely, not all biological artifacts can be replicated with low opportunity costs. For example, Many enzymes used in my labs are extremely costly to replicate/produce. So we just buy them from biotech companies. I believe such companies should be given the right to own the specific method they use to make those enzymes in large quantities and at cheaper oppurtunity costs than what can be achieved in college labs. Other wise those companies won't have the incentive to produce such goods, and will make biotech/life sciences extremely costly.
All I advocate is that the extremist anti-private-property sentiments I see in the FOSS community is not justified by reality.
May be in future when all widgets can be replicated with little opportunity costs owing to advances in nano-technology & bio-tech, we may have to come up with some type of post-scarcity economic doctrine.
Let the number of people whom you can feed with a loaf of bread be n.
Let the number of people who can jerk off to one porn file, or use a Windows ISO image be M.
Clearly M > n. Economists call this phenomena scarcity. A loaf of bread is more scarce than a porn video file because potentially infinite number of people can get utilize a porn video file but that is not true for bread.
Scarcity leads to opportunity costs. i.e. the amount of stuff that needs to be not-produced to produce bread.
Differences in opportunity costs for various goods is what drives capitalism. Somebody will find it cheaper to produce bread instead of cereal flakes. Somebody will find it cheaper to produce cereal flakes instead of bread. They will exchange these commodities through a common token of exchange (money) and achieve a total higher production than if each where trying to produce both bread and corn flakes individually without specializing in one commodity & exchange.
However, there is catch. The society needs to legalize private property rights for goods-with-scarcity for the above plan to work. Or else nobody will have the incentive to capitalize on their lower oppurtunity costs for a particular widget if everybody can own/copycat everything he/she produces without exchanging anything in return for it. This will inevitably lead to very low production like what happened in communist economies which had no private property rights.
Geeks are right when they say patents & copyrights are bad for goods with no scarcity. e.g. software, digital media formats
Geeks are wrong when they say patents & copyrights are bad for goods with scarcity. e.g. goods made using biotech.
So my advice for geeks is keep their FOSS ideologies where it belongs, i.e. goods with no scarcity. e.g. bioinformatics.
Biotech is a whole different story. FOSS ideas won't work there.
P.S: Don't mistake biotech for bioinformatics
XKCD should draw stick figure porn in protest..
We should all protest with placards showing stick figure porn.. I am sure the children won't understand it.
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. -- Stanley Garn
