There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)
<i>medicine have been produced for ages without IP law</i><p>Er... I think there&#x27;s a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost.<p>I don&#x27;t think the modern medical industry would work without IP law. You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, <i>working</i> medicine quickly without IP law, but that&#x27;s at best theorycrafting and doesn&#x27;t have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK. I&#x27;m not sure how many people would dedicate their lives to coming up with new medicines, funding enormous safety and efficacy trials, <i>and publishing results</i> if anyone could turn around and copy their work after they poured so much into it.<p>IP law has probably extended too far into software, but I think the argument for its use in medicine is fairly decent.