It might take decades and billions of dollars to prove a molecule can cure disease XYZ. Once you know the molecule, copying it is cheap. Only intellectual property rights can provide the incentive to find said molecule, safe in the knowledge that once it is found, all of the costs can be recouped plus profit.
That is the clear-cut case for intellectual property, but it’s the same principle for books. I’m not going to write a book that takes tons of effort and exposes my hard-won knowledge if I can’t profit from it, despite how easy it is to copy text. Food for thought
It’s true that copyright and patents make pursuing certain risky (from a monetary perspective) innovations that are valuable to society worthwhile. But they’re only one way of solving that problem. We choose to apply copyright almost universally, even to innovations and ideas that don’t suffer from high capital risk, and would be worthwhile to pursue without copyright or with shorter copyright. Why not instead subsidize R&D for successful drugs (a lot of drug research in the U.S. is already publicly funded).
It seems to me that it’s an exceptional case that there’s some idea that’s would benefit society but is only economically viable under the current copyright regime. But our laws apply protections that are only needed in this rare instance to all ideas. I highly recommend “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It changed how I view IP a great deal, and the final chapters are dedicated to how we could practically transition away from our current system.
The government is political. When you make things political, it has requirements separated from the profit motive.
I’m not an anarchist. I think the government has its place. But it’s undeniable that a lot of fundamental research is held hostage by politics: Certain ideas are in vogue and get funded, while the new ideas and those pursuing them must wait, or perhaps never get funded for whatever political reason.
The profit motive enables risk takers to get funded with high risk, high reward ideas. If there was no way to capture that profit, we would be subject to political whims for the most important innovations for society.
I don’t entirely disagree - subsidies aren’t a perfect solution. But the current system is so far from perfect that I think considering alternatives is worthwhile.
I’d be curious how many actual world-changing innovations were ONLY pursued because of the existence of copyright, that don’t belong to a class of innovation (like pharmaceuticals) that could have a solution, whether copyright, subsidies, or something else applied to the industry as a whole. I don’t doubt that there are some, but I would be shocked if their benefit isn’t dwarfed by the innovation lost to the anticompetitive nature of patents and copyright.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. If research is a tree, and the seeds and trunk are funded by the government, then the branches and leaves are the private sector. The government's strength is providing large and longterm funding for ideas with uncertain outcome. The government's weakness is managing and running an enterprise of any scale - see the DMV, any public housing in America of appreciable size, the VA, the vast majority of public schools, and so on. This is because no one in the enterprise has any motivation at all, other than not getting fired, which is practically impossible in the government sector.
I'm fine with initial research being funded by the government, and entrepreneurs attempting to take that research to commercialize it.
That is the clear-cut case for intellectual property, but it’s the same principle for books. I’m not going to write a book that takes tons of effort and exposes my hard-won knowledge if I can’t profit from it, despite how easy it is to copy text. Food for thought