Ask HN: Is there any empirical evidence that patents do good in some industries?

5 points by Devilboy ↗ HN
I know most people here will agree that software patents do more harm than good, but is there actual data to show that patents are good for other industries?

4 comments

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It seems that the development of drugs is such an incredibly expensive investment that you need to grant a limited monopoly to the developer so that he can recoup on it.
Average cost to bring a new drug to market is around $1.5 billion
Drug production is (to oversimplify, please correct) to blindly create millions of combinations, test the successful-looking versions on rats, cats and people, and produce billions of the drug. I wonder how the money is split between those tasks.
The biggest expense is typically human clinical trial where you're looking at a figure in the high hundreds of millions.