Why are pills different to tablets, or tables chairs, xerox machines, rollerblades, velcro, bandaids, kleenex or Scotch tape?
Because everything would be cheaper/free.
I just imagine that chemistry is a total hit or miss luck game. And each try would be very expensive.
it's good to be a Lubavitcher
I’m goin to go out on a limb and guess your are a huge Bernie sanders supporter.
Or the opposite is true and is educated and believed all the crap his professors told him.
Without the motivation of money there would be very little innovation. Even the open source projects would be very limited as a lot of it is built on infrastructure or ideas created by non-open source companies. Imagine Linux in a world without Intel, Microsoft, etc. It would be a shell of its current self.
Okay, so why would someone spend that if they will not profit from it?
Try billions of dollars.
If you think that it would happen but take longer then without patents we would still be at the level of advancement from 100 years ago.
What would be their incentive to do that?
They don't lose anything, I don't think someone who has invested time into something wouldn't already keep some form of documentation of experiments. It's just a matter of passing it on. I don't think that requires incentive.
Ok, so what?
Would you rather: a) Wait 100 years for technology to become cheaper/freeorb) Have all the technology available right away with the option to wait 17 years for patents to expire and then get it cheaper/free
Obviously I would pick option b (is it 17 or 70 years?). But that's good for something like medicine that would still be useful after it becomes available. But what about other things that by the time it comes out there would be better ones that make it useless? So I guess you do have a point by things like medicine. I'll keep that in mind.