Re:Patents Are BAD (Score 1)

In addition, in terms of societal costs/benefits, it prevents the person most capable of producing a left-handed widget from making that widget at a lower cost than you may be able to deliver it for.

The problem with this argument is that it completely discounts the startup cost. If I'm a pharmaceutical company that just spent $10m on R&D to come up with some super-advanced antibiotic, I want to be able to recoup those costs.

Yes, some company can come along and sell my pill for $3 instead of the $10 I charge, but that's because they didn't have to pay the $10m in R&D - they just reverse-engineered one of the pills my company produced. The result of this, in my opinion at least, is that innovation stops - why the hell am I going to spend $10 million to create a drug when some company is going to use all of my research for free, undercut my sales, and therefore cause me to go out of business?

This analogy doesn't adapt quite as well to the software industry, but I think the pharmaceutical industry is the best example of why patents should not simply be abolished.