I'm always astonished by the idea that, were it not for patents and the profits they promise, "no motivation to develop drugs would exist".

At one point I worked with a group that raised money to finance medical research for patients with lupus. These were folks who were seen as too few, and suffering from something too complex, to be profitable. For the most part they were relying on some pretty toxic treatments that hadn't progressed since the 1950's - the pharmaceutical equivalent of pre-anastasia surgery.

Believe me, the people suffering from this were HIGHLY motivated to find a cure, and given an organization capable of focusing that interest, they've raised millions upon millions of dollars* to do exactly that. This was an early form of crowd-funding and it just obliterates the argument that "without patents, there's no motivation to cure stuff."

I'm sorry, but that is absolutely, categorically, and demonstrably false. If people are sick and dying, they have bottomless motivation. Indeed, the extraordinarily high prices people people put on their own lives ("my kingdom for a horse!") represents a profound reservoir of motivation.

The patent and approval system diffuses this deep and natural drive, replacing it with the more limited motivation offered by monopolistic rent-seeking (which aims not to cure disease, but to make it 'manageable').

The thing about an awful disease is that it develops a sense of community. I cannot imagine, for instance, someone who has raised a lot of money to find a cure saying, "yeah, but fuck the next generation that comes along and gets hit with the same affliction - those guys are on their own. WE paid for this, and the cure is OURS. They can reinvent their own damn wheel if they want to live."

Just...no, that's not how people think. What they really think is that in devoting themselves to finding a cure, they are finding a valuable role for themselves in a society that tends to see them as victims. It's how they recover a sense of self-worth and dignity. They are PROUD to pay it forward. Indeed, one of the top sentiments I heard from people I interviewed was "I want to find a cure so that no one else anywhere in the world ever has to suffer what I've gone through because NOBODY deserves this."

THAT's what real decency sounds like. And it's what our patent system frustrates in a very profound way. I know the pharmaceutical industry is always brought up as the tough case against patent reform - the exception that "must" be made in any discussions tending towards to liberalization. I'd argue the opposite. I'd say that this is one of the easiest cases to make. Maybe not a decade ago, but as the organizing power of the internet comes into focus, I can see a world where direct and massively distributed research finance is the norm, with the results made openly available to the entire world.

People who are sick used to feel terribly isolated. Thanks to the internet, that's changing. They're finding they discover others going through the same thing, and that they can use the same channels to pool their resources. Were they given tax credits, their resources would increase substantially. And they don't want to "manage" their diseases. They want to cure them. Researchers working on behalf of people trying to solve their own problem pursue tacks different from those who are working from companies looking to exploit that problem most profitably. And when people finding their own cures succede, their natural impulse is to share their triumph with all mankind, the world over, not start trade wars over IP that use the pain and death of millions already in - or facing - poverty as leverage.

*People who say research costs billions, not millions have been suckered by the most pernicious line of bullshit imaginable. The "billions" figure does not represent actual R&D costs, which, in a shocking number of cases, represent single-digit percentages of pharmaceutical company budgets. Instead, they represent the fully loaded costs of maintain legal departments to protect patents and marketing departments to push drugs in cases where they have marginal or negative value. Inflating the reported development costs into the billions is simply propaganda designed to make any system that doesn't involve patents seem like a financial impossibility.