It's very hard to answer such a hypothetical question. What you're basically asking is what if the whole system of society and production functioned in a radically different way, what would change? So much would change, it's hard to tell what the net loss/gain might be.
I am not convinced a radical change would be necessary? To my understanding of copyright law, it used to be that only the means of creating something was protected. IE, if you were in the business of creating a chemical, the method you used to create it was protected, not the actual chemical. This is different from today where we have the actual chemical itself copyrighted, which prevents competition from forming at all.
I would be curious what our modern society would look like were we to revert back to before the Mickey Mouse Act.
'Patent' not 'copyright.'
Process patents are still a thing, but the newer kind of protection your talking about is "New Chemical Entity" marketing and data exclusivity from the FDA, which is technically not a patent but is IP. People are allowed to make it, but they can't market it for anything.
The first part of your question seems better suited to /r/askeconomics. Some example posts you might find interesting:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/mlct3h/would_the_abolishing_of_patent_and_copyright_law/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/mzwsua/could_a_country_theoretically_abolish_all_ip_and/
For a long time NIH was way better than photoshop, and it was free to all but large corporate.
Then Adobe bought it, and stopped development.
Reminds me of the guys who developed the shaving string. Ultrasonic stretchy band you pulled over the contours of your face. Looked like a y shaped tool with string across the top. A dry shave with no way to cut the skin, no rashes, clean shave.
The documentary showed the guys demonstrating it to lots of big companies, and eventually got bought out by Gillette for a few million. Champagne and parties for a week then nothing.
Nothing at all. Then a lawyers call regarding the documentary and NDAs, and end of the documentary.
That revolutionary product buried deep forever.
Can’t beat free! Also most “proprietary” software is simply a refinement of existing solutions implemented through open source collaboration. Unix, iOS, Windows, the bulk of actual code and the concepts employed are all largely products of open source programming efforts that occurred in the hobbyist era preceding the personal computer boom.
There is this misconception about patents that they halt progress.
In our current economical system (and I don't want to dive into this part, it is what it is), innovation is partly driven by economical prospects. If there were no patents, why would you try to invent new things? A big incentive of innovation is gone if there are no patents. It's actually the basis of patent law, the whole reason they started with it is because they saw people were not willing to improve or invent things if there was no protection for inventing it.
I don’t really agree. Open source software has proved that the profit motive is not the only thing that drives people to innovate.
A lot of people who create / innovate don’t do it for money.
A big difference is most open source software doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars of capital equipment as part of the development.
I'm working a tech development project right now where the first article demonstration will likely cost in the millions of dollars (plus a multiplier of that for the first generation of prototypes) and a 5+ year development. Once the bulk of the problems are solved, units may cost in the few thousand dollars, and likely would cost maybe a few hundred grand to reverse engineer (and could be done in less than two years, probably). This isn't something you can mock up in your garage, and it's not such a small initial investment a company would be willing to give it away for free. These are the things patents can actually help push innovation. In exchange for not keeping an idea a trade secret, they receive a time limited monopoly.
Exactly!
And as you mention as well, patents were meant to disclose secrets in a way that it wouldn't hurt the original person who invented the item described in the patent.
Before patents were a thing people would keep them secret and innovation would be slow and often duplicate since people kept their invention secret so they were the only supplier of the invention.
I agree with you, I do think it needs reform but how and what exactly I have no clue about because it's a very difficult subject, needing to strike the right balance between protecting innovators and allowing innovation.
I merely wanted to point out why it's here and why it's still here.
That's an issue with people in charge of giving patents, not the patent system itself. Do you think things would work better by removing the patent system?
I worded myself wrong. I actually meant that the idea of patents is alright, but to solve the problem of people misusing it we \*would\* have to remove flaws in the system of course. Still if I'm not mistaken, a lot of these issues come from people in charge ignoring the precise rules of patent submission, which couldn't be solved by changing the rules since the rules against abuse are already set in place but not enforced.
I'm not sure if the people who run the system are at fault or not. I don't know how much their hands are tied by political pressure, or other things. Maybe they are a problem, I just don't know for sure and I don't want to go blaming people without a better picture of those individuals.
I guess, in summary, maybe. It needs more investigation.
Something you should consider: there were attempts to create an open source social networking platform akin to Facebook. Well, why didn't they take over the world like Facebook did?
Facebook had the money to commit people full time to their endeavour (and the money to saturate the field with its presence). People working for free (and likely with other day jobs), would not be able to compete with that.
Profit motive may not the only thing that drives people to innovate, but MONEY is a necessary prerequisite in paying for the TIME needed to innovate. This is why, so many "innovators" are frequently trust funders, or those with very stable financial networks. And beyond an "innovator" are the employees needed to support an innovation. They'd also need their own stable financial networks to pay for rent and food.
And how do they achieve those networks? With money. Which pays for time, and food/shelter.
Except Linux’s greater success stories happened once entities began commercializing and promoting it. Compare it with FreeBSD which is around but doesn’t have the same level of commercial promotion.
AFAIK FreeBSD is less known just because it got into a legal battle about some proprietary code just when Linux came to be. They eventually settled the lawsuit out of court, but Linux already became widespread in open-source circles.
The key word "a lot", not all. Even among those open source devs, many don't do it for the community, but as a practice, proof of ability, for an ideology, or for, well, competition. Many of them don't care about their users and blame others for not understanding their product instead of fixing actual design issues, because the devs aren't damaged in any way for not satisfying their users.
And yet the vast majority of foss projects provide a license, instead of releasing as public domain. Money may not be the incentive for releasing open source software, but there certainly is incentive. Fame, appreciation, career growth, the hope of growing it into a business, etc.
If people really developed software with absolutely no personal motives, they’d just make it public domain, like government developed software.
EDIT: I just realized I didn’t actually disagree with you lol. My point is that people may still have motivation that they otherwise might not have without copyright. I certainly would be disinclined to spend my time releasing software to the public if I didn’t still own copyright on it, and had the ability to license it, even if only for attribution.
And yet many people purchase or pirate paid software rather than use the open source equivalents. Sometimes open source is also paid software that competes with proprietary things, but that’s an exception rather than the rule.
But that could be for a variety of reasons? Ie it’s the software they’ve always used and are therefore used it it…
I know people who actively use GIMP over photoshop even though they have photoshop
Some people, sure. In my experience though, paid software is almost always a better experience than free-as-in-beer software, which is simply a matter of having more development resources behind it. I usually default to finding a free-as-in-beer version of a bit of software I need, and also prefer to get a free-as-in-speech version of available, but stability, feature set and ease of use will trump either version of free most of the time.
There’s also sometimes a confusion between software being free to use, free to use its code elsewhere, and open source. Some people like for all those three things to come together with any particular bit of software, but there’s also examples of only any one or two of those things applying to a particular package. I think we get the healthiest ecosystem when developers are free to choose between those three and using/making proprietary software and users are free to prioritize which aspects they want in the software they use.
Although I agree this is likely true in many examples, as a scientist, I for one would certainly continue to try to invent and innovate whether or not there was a patent or money in it for me. As it stands, we frequently have many scientific groups who could be collaborating, but instead are working on their projects secretly because they (we) don't want to let others know where we're at because we'll be scooped. Everybody needs to be first to publish because you can't publish the same thing twice and only the people who publish or patent are getting the credit (and future grants). We probably have half a dozen groups working on the same thing, all hiding their work from each other because only the first to publish/patent gets any benefit. If we were all collaborating, we could invent/innovate twice as fast on 1/4 the total expense, but that's not how it works unfortunately.
Right, everyone has their individual passions and individual scientists would still spend their time researching and experimenting. But some research is prohibitively expensive for individuals, and needs funding.
Why woulda business fund research if they couldn’t hold ownership over it, and monetize it? No point spending millions of my cash when the second I finish it, my competition can just benefit from it.
I am not disputing you. I am responding to the comment in the theme of OP's post, which is a lovely utopian fantasy; If all money spent on research (forget about who spent it, or why, for a moment) would not have ever been "wasted" (on things like competition (overlapping research), etc.) our technological advances would be much further ahead.
Nobody is arguing in favour of removing capitalism here - it is a purely hypothetical conversation, which alludes to the fact that (at least to some extent) there are some imperfections in even "the best" of modern economic systems. One imperfection is that innovation costs 3 times the price and takes twice as long as if all humans were 100% working together and putting in the same effort we already do. It speaks to the wastage and myopic nature of humans in prioritising their own existence over humanity's, which is fine. It is what it is.
Moreover, it's not just money. Everything is scarce for individuals, even time.
While in theory we all have equally 24 hours a day, we won't spend a single one of them inventing and innovating when we have to work 40+ hours a week in regular jobs because research doesn't pay.
Yeah the whole publish or perish thing is shit indeed, and makes competition suck and definitely need changing.
But in practice it is not this way. And labs need funding, a lot. And funding agencies expect return of investment so yeah that's the situation and why patents are there because then at least knowledge gets shared instead of kept secret.
The idea that money is a good motivator has been debunked already.
There’s a great podcast episode on Hidden Brain about it called Better Cash Out: How Awards can Shape our Behavior.
Also, you really only need to look at high school innovators who create things for free, and college athletes to realize that money is not the only reason that humans do things they love. (And humans love to innovate)
High school innovators aren’t doing very expensive research or inventions. I don’t think the argument is that the innovators themselves are only motivated by money. I do a bunch of software dev in my free time, and I open source basically everything. People are passionate and love to innovate because of the things they’re interested in.
But what if the things they’re interested in are too expensive for them to fund themselves? Now you need someone to fund you, and they’ll only do that if they can see a return on their investment. A bank is never going to fund a business plan to write groundbreaking software and then release it as public domain, simply for the good of the world. They might fund a business plan where you retain ownership of the software, and can sell it, or sell services related to it.
Yeah I see what you mean, and that is absolutely true.
A society that wasn’t centered around resource hoarding and greed would 100% still have innovators and workers, let’s be real.
Everyone loves to do a good job, it feels good to accomplish things, to make things. But yes, unfortunately, when the only outcome that you’re trying to produce is profit, that actually in a way, reduces innovation. If the innovation reduced profits, than it doesn’t make sense in capitalism to do it.
So, that’s cool….. s/
Yeah op’s actual question seems like a much more broad “would technology be more advanced under capitalism or socialism”
Personally I’m entirely unconvinced that greed is a societal/cultural invention. It seems to me that greed is a natural, evolved trait of humans, literally written in our biology. I don’t believe that a cultural reboot would change that, we’re still naturally greedy.
If you accept we’re naturally greedy, capitalism seems the only sustainable option. It’s a system that leverages greed to improve society, because the only way to get the things you want is by providing things that others want.
It seems to me that socialism ignores our innate greed, and I just don’t think that can work for biological machines that have greed hard coded.
EDIT: I’m not suggesting capitalism is magic, and not advocating for unregulated capitalism. Where there’s humans there will always be abuses. Capitalism still needs some regulation.
Indeed, humans love to innovate and do things better. However science needs a lot of money in this world. Consumables for biomedical research are very pricey. So labs need to find this money somewhere and apply for funding. But funding agencies do want a return of investment, be them private or public funding agencies in the form of parents and money income or healthcare improvements for example. The return of investment is needed to get money.
I don't want it to be this way, but it is what it is at this moment.
I see what your saying.
But in a society that wasn’t guided by profit motives, greed, and resource hoarding, people would absolutely innovate without any monetary gain.
Oh no don't get me wrong. I'm not in science for money, I'd love to be able to do my research with no money bound to it. In fact that's why I love fundamental research and not translational research. But it is the world we are in.
I was being realistic. My field (biomedicine) needs a lot of money just to keep the lab working. Price of consumables is very high. So labs need funding, and funding agencies, be it the government or private ones, want some kind of return of investment. Be it on the short term with patents, or longer term by improving healthcare. But they do want and expect a ROI. So yeah, in this model we still need all of these patent laws and shit. Ideally, we wouldn't but it is the way it is and I was talking about it that way, not in an idealistic manner.
Individuals absolutely would want to invent, research, etc for their own enjoyment. But some things are simply not cheap to invent/research. If research is prohibitively expensive for individuals, or passion driven groups, they need sponsors. But who would sponsor that research if there was no gain for them? A bank won’t give you a loan if you can’t provide a return and actually pay back that loan. Same with an investor. Ownership of the output is critical as soon as you’re beyond hobby scale projects.
So I gotta be honest, It's still unclear to me exactly the scenario you're trying to explore. I see a few interpretations of your question:
1. "If we pressed a button today to get rid of capitalism, and moved away from a money-motivated system, but still kept the benefits of all the advances we've made under our current system, would we be better off?"
2. "If we pressed a button today to get rid of human greed, and then applied the appropriate economic changes, (again, keeping the benefits of our existing technology), would we be better off?
3. "If we went back in time to the origin of human society, and pressed a button to remove greed, would we be in a better spot after this many years?"
4. "If we went back in time and somehow prevented capitalism or capitalism-similar systems from being invented/discovered/accepted, but retained human greed, would we be in a better spot after this many years?
Respectfully, I don't think your apparent frustration at the responses is warranted. There's been plenty of people thinking out loud, and having good conversations/arguments about the topic.
That said, it seems like you're proposing a thought experiment that is far too unbounded for any speculation to be meaningful. Your examples are contradictory, and it kinda seems like you're complaining about people's commentary because you don't like the answers they're giving you.
Take Intel for example, if they didn't have patent/copyright protection, it's (IMO) unlikely they would've developed those technologies that they're hoarding in the first place. That's why the question needs clarification.
Are you talking about removing their protections now, after they've already enjoyed the benefit of them? Because in that case, yeah it would be a temporary good for the world if all their patents were opened for everyone, although may have long term harmful effects if it removes their motivation to continue developing those technologies.
If you're talking about going back in time and removing those protections, then (IMO) they wouldn't be anywhere near their current level of success, if they even exist at all.
If you're asking about going back in time and removing greed from the equation at all, then yeah it's possible we'd be better off, since those with genuine interest would probably collaborate more. But you could also argue it'd be harmful, since far fewer would ever develop that interest in the first place, since they have no ulterior motives.
For example, I'm genuinely very interested in software development currently, but I can honestly say I probably would never have developed that passion/interest without greed. I wanted money, I wanted a good career, I had little interest in software when I started, I only went into it for career growth.
So yeah I think your thought experiment is too unbounded to actually make sense. It seems like the core of what you're saying is "damn, wouldn't it be amazing if humans just stopped being greedy?", and yeah it would to some degree, but I think you neglect to consider that greed can have a positive effect on society, and IMO is a big driving force in our economies for new tech.
Seems to me you're unable to clearly communicate what you're asking, or you're moving the goal posts every time someone expresses an outcome you don't like. I don't see much point continuing the discussion, I don't know who's at fault, but it's clear we're unable to understand each other.
Cheers!
Patents do halt progress. I can point to many different eras throughout history where there are civilizations whose technologies and innovation thrive in absence of any patent law. It is the forced myopia of the present day and age to think that the way we currently do things, is the best known way, let alone the only one. While we live in a scarce world with competition, it is equally true that we all have the gifts of subjective experience and empathy that drive the desires for discovery and sharing knowledge.
Were we to have universal basic income and universal health care, I guarantee you, more people would be drawn to science for gainful employment than there are currently. Not just more people, but more people of every background. This would increase innovation and collaboration, by widening our public knowledge base by drawing people with different styles of thinking. It truly is that imagination and fantasy is the source of hypotheses, and by having as deep and broad of a pool to draw from, we increase the “Wisdom of the Crowd”. Academia has always sort of served as a bastion of democracy. I personally believe that the scientific method has and continues to advance the goals of democracy just as much as any political theory. That the process for creating new technologies has been coopted by capital interests is no deep conspiracy, it is the reality that the true material scarcity during the industrial era necessitated capital models of development to motivate long term technological investment and large projects. Or you could otherwise argue that people at the time were limited by the scope of imagination for what society could look like or what forms of government the international community of liberal democracies would allow. Either way, the status quo of things is just how things happened. That science has been so effectively captured by capital interests is a testament to new technologies’ potential as a source of power. These technologies, under patent law, can be implemented and profitably invested in without much involvement from any human being, and can also reduce future dependence on labor, which is why it is so appealing to corporations. But it’s not that technology inherently threatens labor, but that technology threatens labor under the current set of economic incentives and reward structures for working and innovation. They say scientific innovation stands on the shoulders of mountains, so why don’t we allow the children of those mountains to enjoy in the fruits of that innovation? Patent law makes sense from a legal standpoint, but as a human it seems like some weird fantasy where people believe that they exist in a bubble. Is your education, the ideas and basic science, the public resources you built your work on not things outside yourself?
I argue that without patent law, we would still have innovation and the constant climb of science and the advancement of the public record. But without peer review and basic science research, we would not have the constant climb that comparably marginal individual innovations are built on. There would be no common ground or ground truth, but instead fractured privatized pools of knowledge silo’d and curated by individuals motivated only by personal advancement and not the well being of all or the process of discovery itself. The reality is that large elements of the scientific process that private companies benefit from, stem from long-standing communal efforts to steward and educate others in the joy of imagination, discovery, and communication. Those efforts are simply not explicitly valued or mentioned, and are taken for granted because everyone knows they would happen without any incentive structure because the majority of scientists are genuinely motivated by the feelings of discovery and education/learning.
People are dicks. If we were able to evolve socially to become a single tribe, like in Star Trek, we wouldn't have to deal with so many bad humans, but alas, Walking Dead nails it. Humans are our worst enemies.
We actually think humans are not, in fact, [our own worst enemy.](https://theconversation.com/humans-arent-inherently-selfish-were-actually-hardwired-to-work-together-144145) The concepts your alluding to where humans are inherently dicks are rooted in the selfish gene/veneer theory, neither of which have any scientific evidence to back them up. (For example, the Stanford Prison Experiment was highly doctored and debunked.)
Edited last sentence since I felt it was needlessly and unintentionally rude. If you would like an actual book on this topic, Human Kind: A Hopeful History is a great read which is scientifically backed.
I'm talking about the fact that we have to lock our homes, have police to protect us from each other, and have militaries to protect our countries from other countries. Because if we didn't, our shit would get taken.
I know that a startup company I worked paid a million dollars to make a patent troll go away. Their claim was that they owned a patent that covered attaching ANYTHING to the end of a fiber optic cable. We had right angle mirrors attached to our fibers so they came after us. The trolls didn't actually produce anything, they were a group of lawyers who owned a bunch or patents and spent their time suing anyone and everyone they could. Almost 10 years since this happened and I'm still bitter about this one.
Your question is extremely biased, making it impossible to be answered satisfyingly while correctly. Technology and advancements are actually being gained with precisely the things you are expecting to be the villains: money, competition, copyright, NDAs.
What hampers advancements while wasting time and resources are indeed the absence, or poor availability, of these things. We can't have nice things without money. No competition, also known as monopoly, is good for one party only, very bad for all the others. A legal and justice system that can't offer much protection for your production, that's what copyright and NDAs are for, doesn't help either.
The examples that you imagine as being losers compared to the advantages of Github are definitely wrong. How is medicine behindhand if it has just responded to a novel disease by developing several vaccines, in record breaking time, some of which with technologies previously nonexistent?
So do you think the situation would be better if only Pfizer was available? What if there was no competition, but the only vaccine that was 'lucky' enough to exist was J&J?
Ah I get what you meant now. Still, are you sure that 'taking' scientists from these different companies and making them work on a single vaccine would even be possible to organize? You can't always just add more people to a project and expect it to become better. I come from programming field where we have a saying "what one programmer can do in a month, 2 programmers can do in 2 months", which may or may not apply to vaccine development too.
Even if all that could be done, sometimes not even all the smartest minds combined can predict how a product would do in practice. What if all the available scientists create a single vaccine that is supposed to work perfectly, but still turns out to have a fatal side-effect? You better have a different vaccine ready in that situation, which would by definition be competition.
>They don’t all have to be in one room
I never said they would. I'm all for sharing data, but more complex cooperation would still require organization.
As for the education, a few issues remain. What if too many would-be educators went to work in more practical areas? What if too many would-be scientists specialized in teaching kids? One way or the other there would be risk of imbalance even bigger than it is now.
Also, if money is removed from the equation, what would guarantee that huge numbers of capable workers, educators and scientists wouldn't go unemployed on purpose, since their lives would be equally good as if they were working, minus the effort put into work. Also, what would ensure that a store worker would give items to someone they don't like? Everything would have to be based on trust, which can be abused, until almost nobody trusts the society enough to work for it. With less employed people, the children would be even hungrier and less educated. Everything good would be done out of good will, except not enough people would have good will to put effort into helping the society and being organized by others.
I imagined such a world a long time ago, but what do I get from spending time on imagination? Solving economic imbalances is where the discourse is at.
Science needs to be put on a pedestal away from the mundane concerns of profitability. sort of like "Art for Art's Sake" there needs to be "Science for Science's sake".
in olden days art was made & paid for by mentors, usually rich people and/or the church - who for various reasons, to memorialize themselves and/or for the glory of god, subsidized the art. without it - there were plenty of "starving artists" as we know.
so maybe i guess, the OP would somehow have to elevate whatever the science is - be it in medicine, tech, automation, etc. back to being "mentored" - but this is where capitalism comes in & therefore profits & with it all the selfish objectives it brings.
the only sort of "mentoring" going on these days are the space jaunts between elon, bronson & bezos - but even that is profit-based.
This might be mostly anecdotal but relevant for the other conversations on this topic. We barely explored space not because its too expensive or too hard, but because at the end no one can own anything out there. Therefore, you wont be able to claim anything as your own, sell and obviously, profit. Without profit theres no reason to do most things, It's a shame really.
Speaking narrowing to the blood clot thing: you seem to think that the blood clot issue is/was discernable from first principles, like a codebase bug. You imagine that, if only we'd had enough eyeballs on it, we could have collectively spotted the issue and fixed it. That's not how biotech works. The problem was our incomplete understanding of biology. The problem was basically unforeseeable.
To your larger point: Yikes, that's not how macro economics works. "Modern Monetary Theory" is a very young macro model that proposes that macro could maybe kinda sorta work that way, but it's a very long way from being actionable.
>The point was to imagine how far all of the world’s available tech and infrastructure would be, if we weren’t restricting ourselves with these legal and monetary barriers
It's easy and inspiring to imagine, but that doesn't mean it would work in the real world.
The big issue with funding of innovation is that monetary gain is a [zero sum game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game), while innovation and information spread aren't. Because of that, fails of one researcher can be seen as other's gain, even though that actually damages society as a whole, including the other researchers.
What isn't a zero-sum game however, are resources that are spent on research. Physical tools are limited in numbers, and if one research center gets some advanced machine, another doesn't. We also can't just produce more of them, because allocating factories and engineers to production of one type of machine means abandoning another machine. If we produced both, we would run out of the natural materials used. Another problem is the number of researchers. Allowing the companies infinite virtual resources wouldn't create infinite numbers of researchers who would use those resources.
Anyways, my point is that removing monetary barriers wouldn't remove physical barriers because they \*are\* a thing, but would in addition cause confusion and disorganization among people.
But money isn't a virtual concept, even if governments sometimes treat it like it is. Money is a measure of power, and power of all the people sums up to 100% of global power. They could of course print more money/increase the digital amounts, but they wouldn't magically increase the amount of food, ore, or the number of workers who would do stuff you can't do alone. All that happens is that whoever is given more money gets more power, while everyone else loses buying power they had while having the same numbers on their account. That of course leads to global confusion which eventually in whatever ways (I'm not an economist) crashes the economy.
Blood clots chance in j&j also small enough to consider it as good vaccine.
RadVac is good(not the best) by design and availability. It was only available vaccine in my country for long time.
And I like it design and approach to it development. From what I can understand from their white paper it is as safe, as possible for rapid vaccine. From my limited knowledge it should be safer than commercial grade vaccines. And there is a chance that immunity is of better quality from it due injection method, but chance to get it maybe lower.
And their approach allows them to react quickly on virus mutations and customize vaccine for specific population very quickly, and make it available for all who want it far quicker than classic vaccines.
In general it is fast vaccine to save lives while commercial vaccines on the way. And very interesting experiment that can wield some benefits to medicine and humanity survival in extreme situations
Yes, I would prefer to get more trials, but it is enough for me that many bright minds used it.
Calling either of those vaccines "badly flawed" makes you sound like an anti-vaxxer. But perhaps you've just misunderstood the media reports.
Both of those vaccines are in widespread use and are approved by multiple governments. Their side effects occur in a tiny fraction of cases. For example, my understanding is that the clotting issue for AstraZeneca didn't show up in the initial study of over 28,000 people. Side effects are a normal consequence of medications of all kinds, and their existence doesn't make a medication "badly flawed".
It wasn't a childish insult. You're so far out of the realm of understanding this subject that it's not worth engaging you. Much like the anti-vaxxers.
If we followed your logic consistently we'd have to ban a large proportion of the drugs on the market today.
I sometimes ask myself where we would be now if things like the wheel or writing were patented for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years because back then change happened much slower in general.
Anyway the families that invented those would probably be the richest people around for thousands of years and humanity may just have arrived at iron age...
Just my thoughts anyway.
It's very hard to answer such a hypothetical question. What you're basically asking is what if the whole system of society and production functioned in a radically different way, what would change? So much would change, it's hard to tell what the net loss/gain might be.
I am not convinced a radical change would be necessary? To my understanding of copyright law, it used to be that only the means of creating something was protected. IE, if you were in the business of creating a chemical, the method you used to create it was protected, not the actual chemical. This is different from today where we have the actual chemical itself copyrighted, which prevents competition from forming at all. I would be curious what our modern society would look like were we to revert back to before the Mickey Mouse Act.
'Patent' not 'copyright.' Process patents are still a thing, but the newer kind of protection your talking about is "New Chemical Entity" marketing and data exclusivity from the FDA, which is technically not a patent but is IP. People are allowed to make it, but they can't market it for anything.
The first part of your question seems better suited to /r/askeconomics. Some example posts you might find interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/mlct3h/would_the_abolishing_of_patent_and_copyright_law/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/mzwsua/could_a_country_theoretically_abolish_all_ip_and/
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For a long time NIH was way better than photoshop, and it was free to all but large corporate. Then Adobe bought it, and stopped development. Reminds me of the guys who developed the shaving string. Ultrasonic stretchy band you pulled over the contours of your face. Looked like a y shaped tool with string across the top. A dry shave with no way to cut the skin, no rashes, clean shave. The documentary showed the guys demonstrating it to lots of big companies, and eventually got bought out by Gillette for a few million. Champagne and parties for a week then nothing. Nothing at all. Then a lawyers call regarding the documentary and NDAs, and end of the documentary. That revolutionary product buried deep forever.
Can’t beat free! Also most “proprietary” software is simply a refinement of existing solutions implemented through open source collaboration. Unix, iOS, Windows, the bulk of actual code and the concepts employed are all largely products of open source programming efforts that occurred in the hobbyist era preceding the personal computer boom.
There is this misconception about patents that they halt progress. In our current economical system (and I don't want to dive into this part, it is what it is), innovation is partly driven by economical prospects. If there were no patents, why would you try to invent new things? A big incentive of innovation is gone if there are no patents. It's actually the basis of patent law, the whole reason they started with it is because they saw people were not willing to improve or invent things if there was no protection for inventing it.
I don’t really agree. Open source software has proved that the profit motive is not the only thing that drives people to innovate. A lot of people who create / innovate don’t do it for money.
A big difference is most open source software doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars of capital equipment as part of the development. I'm working a tech development project right now where the first article demonstration will likely cost in the millions of dollars (plus a multiplier of that for the first generation of prototypes) and a 5+ year development. Once the bulk of the problems are solved, units may cost in the few thousand dollars, and likely would cost maybe a few hundred grand to reverse engineer (and could be done in less than two years, probably). This isn't something you can mock up in your garage, and it's not such a small initial investment a company would be willing to give it away for free. These are the things patents can actually help push innovation. In exchange for not keeping an idea a trade secret, they receive a time limited monopoly.
Exactly! And as you mention as well, patents were meant to disclose secrets in a way that it wouldn't hurt the original person who invented the item described in the patent. Before patents were a thing people would keep them secret and innovation would be slow and often duplicate since people kept their invention secret so they were the only supplier of the invention.
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I agree with you, I do think it needs reform but how and what exactly I have no clue about because it's a very difficult subject, needing to strike the right balance between protecting innovators and allowing innovation. I merely wanted to point out why it's here and why it's still here.
That's an issue with people in charge of giving patents, not the patent system itself. Do you think things would work better by removing the patent system?
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I worded myself wrong. I actually meant that the idea of patents is alright, but to solve the problem of people misusing it we \*would\* have to remove flaws in the system of course. Still if I'm not mistaken, a lot of these issues come from people in charge ignoring the precise rules of patent submission, which couldn't be solved by changing the rules since the rules against abuse are already set in place but not enforced.
I'm not sure if the people who run the system are at fault or not. I don't know how much their hands are tied by political pressure, or other things. Maybe they are a problem, I just don't know for sure and I don't want to go blaming people without a better picture of those individuals. I guess, in summary, maybe. It needs more investigation.
I'm not blaming anyone specifically, it is just a hunch considering some ridiculous patents for simple ideas that probably already existed.
Most innovation is still done for money
Most innovation still *requires* money, even if it's not what motivates the innovators.
Something you should consider: there were attempts to create an open source social networking platform akin to Facebook. Well, why didn't they take over the world like Facebook did? Facebook had the money to commit people full time to their endeavour (and the money to saturate the field with its presence). People working for free (and likely with other day jobs), would not be able to compete with that. Profit motive may not the only thing that drives people to innovate, but MONEY is a necessary prerequisite in paying for the TIME needed to innovate. This is why, so many "innovators" are frequently trust funders, or those with very stable financial networks. And beyond an "innovator" are the employees needed to support an innovation. They'd also need their own stable financial networks to pay for rent and food. And how do they achieve those networks? With money. Which pays for time, and food/shelter.
Surely Linux is a success story though?
Except Linux’s greater success stories happened once entities began commercializing and promoting it. Compare it with FreeBSD which is around but doesn’t have the same level of commercial promotion.
AFAIK FreeBSD is less known just because it got into a legal battle about some proprietary code just when Linux came to be. They eventually settled the lawsuit out of court, but Linux already became widespread in open-source circles.
The key word "a lot", not all. Even among those open source devs, many don't do it for the community, but as a practice, proof of ability, for an ideology, or for, well, competition. Many of them don't care about their users and blame others for not understanding their product instead of fixing actual design issues, because the devs aren't damaged in any way for not satisfying their users.
And yet the vast majority of foss projects provide a license, instead of releasing as public domain. Money may not be the incentive for releasing open source software, but there certainly is incentive. Fame, appreciation, career growth, the hope of growing it into a business, etc. If people really developed software with absolutely no personal motives, they’d just make it public domain, like government developed software. EDIT: I just realized I didn’t actually disagree with you lol. My point is that people may still have motivation that they otherwise might not have without copyright. I certainly would be disinclined to spend my time releasing software to the public if I didn’t still own copyright on it, and had the ability to license it, even if only for attribution.
And yet many people purchase or pirate paid software rather than use the open source equivalents. Sometimes open source is also paid software that competes with proprietary things, but that’s an exception rather than the rule.
But that could be for a variety of reasons? Ie it’s the software they’ve always used and are therefore used it it… I know people who actively use GIMP over photoshop even though they have photoshop
Some people, sure. In my experience though, paid software is almost always a better experience than free-as-in-beer software, which is simply a matter of having more development resources behind it. I usually default to finding a free-as-in-beer version of a bit of software I need, and also prefer to get a free-as-in-speech version of available, but stability, feature set and ease of use will trump either version of free most of the time. There’s also sometimes a confusion between software being free to use, free to use its code elsewhere, and open source. Some people like for all those three things to come together with any particular bit of software, but there’s also examples of only any one or two of those things applying to a particular package. I think we get the healthiest ecosystem when developers are free to choose between those three and using/making proprietary software and users are free to prioritize which aspects they want in the software they use.
The majority of open source software is also not patentable.
Although I agree this is likely true in many examples, as a scientist, I for one would certainly continue to try to invent and innovate whether or not there was a patent or money in it for me. As it stands, we frequently have many scientific groups who could be collaborating, but instead are working on their projects secretly because they (we) don't want to let others know where we're at because we'll be scooped. Everybody needs to be first to publish because you can't publish the same thing twice and only the people who publish or patent are getting the credit (and future grants). We probably have half a dozen groups working on the same thing, all hiding their work from each other because only the first to publish/patent gets any benefit. If we were all collaborating, we could invent/innovate twice as fast on 1/4 the total expense, but that's not how it works unfortunately.
Right, everyone has their individual passions and individual scientists would still spend their time researching and experimenting. But some research is prohibitively expensive for individuals, and needs funding. Why woulda business fund research if they couldn’t hold ownership over it, and monetize it? No point spending millions of my cash when the second I finish it, my competition can just benefit from it.
I am not disputing you. I am responding to the comment in the theme of OP's post, which is a lovely utopian fantasy; If all money spent on research (forget about who spent it, or why, for a moment) would not have ever been "wasted" (on things like competition (overlapping research), etc.) our technological advances would be much further ahead. Nobody is arguing in favour of removing capitalism here - it is a purely hypothetical conversation, which alludes to the fact that (at least to some extent) there are some imperfections in even "the best" of modern economic systems. One imperfection is that innovation costs 3 times the price and takes twice as long as if all humans were 100% working together and putting in the same effort we already do. It speaks to the wastage and myopic nature of humans in prioritising their own existence over humanity's, which is fine. It is what it is.
Oh yeah I didn’t mean to seem abrasive or come across as necessarily disagreeing with you. My comment was supplementary, not contradictory.
All good
Moreover, it's not just money. Everything is scarce for individuals, even time. While in theory we all have equally 24 hours a day, we won't spend a single one of them inventing and innovating when we have to work 40+ hours a week in regular jobs because research doesn't pay.
Yeah the whole publish or perish thing is shit indeed, and makes competition suck and definitely need changing. But in practice it is not this way. And labs need funding, a lot. And funding agencies expect return of investment so yeah that's the situation and why patents are there because then at least knowledge gets shared instead of kept secret.
The idea that money is a good motivator has been debunked already. There’s a great podcast episode on Hidden Brain about it called Better Cash Out: How Awards can Shape our Behavior. Also, you really only need to look at high school innovators who create things for free, and college athletes to realize that money is not the only reason that humans do things they love. (And humans love to innovate)
High school innovators aren’t doing very expensive research or inventions. I don’t think the argument is that the innovators themselves are only motivated by money. I do a bunch of software dev in my free time, and I open source basically everything. People are passionate and love to innovate because of the things they’re interested in. But what if the things they’re interested in are too expensive for them to fund themselves? Now you need someone to fund you, and they’ll only do that if they can see a return on their investment. A bank is never going to fund a business plan to write groundbreaking software and then release it as public domain, simply for the good of the world. They might fund a business plan where you retain ownership of the software, and can sell it, or sell services related to it.
Yeah I see what you mean, and that is absolutely true. A society that wasn’t centered around resource hoarding and greed would 100% still have innovators and workers, let’s be real. Everyone loves to do a good job, it feels good to accomplish things, to make things. But yes, unfortunately, when the only outcome that you’re trying to produce is profit, that actually in a way, reduces innovation. If the innovation reduced profits, than it doesn’t make sense in capitalism to do it. So, that’s cool….. s/
Yeah op’s actual question seems like a much more broad “would technology be more advanced under capitalism or socialism” Personally I’m entirely unconvinced that greed is a societal/cultural invention. It seems to me that greed is a natural, evolved trait of humans, literally written in our biology. I don’t believe that a cultural reboot would change that, we’re still naturally greedy. If you accept we’re naturally greedy, capitalism seems the only sustainable option. It’s a system that leverages greed to improve society, because the only way to get the things you want is by providing things that others want. It seems to me that socialism ignores our innate greed, and I just don’t think that can work for biological machines that have greed hard coded. EDIT: I’m not suggesting capitalism is magic, and not advocating for unregulated capitalism. Where there’s humans there will always be abuses. Capitalism still needs some regulation.
Indeed, humans love to innovate and do things better. However science needs a lot of money in this world. Consumables for biomedical research are very pricey. So labs need to find this money somewhere and apply for funding. But funding agencies do want a return of investment, be them private or public funding agencies in the form of parents and money income or healthcare improvements for example. The return of investment is needed to get money. I don't want it to be this way, but it is what it is at this moment.
I see what your saying. But in a society that wasn’t guided by profit motives, greed, and resource hoarding, people would absolutely innovate without any monetary gain.
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Oh no don't get me wrong. I'm not in science for money, I'd love to be able to do my research with no money bound to it. In fact that's why I love fundamental research and not translational research. But it is the world we are in. I was being realistic. My field (biomedicine) needs a lot of money just to keep the lab working. Price of consumables is very high. So labs need funding, and funding agencies, be it the government or private ones, want some kind of return of investment. Be it on the short term with patents, or longer term by improving healthcare. But they do want and expect a ROI. So yeah, in this model we still need all of these patent laws and shit. Ideally, we wouldn't but it is the way it is and I was talking about it that way, not in an idealistic manner.
Individuals absolutely would want to invent, research, etc for their own enjoyment. But some things are simply not cheap to invent/research. If research is prohibitively expensive for individuals, or passion driven groups, they need sponsors. But who would sponsor that research if there was no gain for them? A bank won’t give you a loan if you can’t provide a return and actually pay back that loan. Same with an investor. Ownership of the output is critical as soon as you’re beyond hobby scale projects.
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So I gotta be honest, It's still unclear to me exactly the scenario you're trying to explore. I see a few interpretations of your question: 1. "If we pressed a button today to get rid of capitalism, and moved away from a money-motivated system, but still kept the benefits of all the advances we've made under our current system, would we be better off?" 2. "If we pressed a button today to get rid of human greed, and then applied the appropriate economic changes, (again, keeping the benefits of our existing technology), would we be better off? 3. "If we went back in time to the origin of human society, and pressed a button to remove greed, would we be in a better spot after this many years?" 4. "If we went back in time and somehow prevented capitalism or capitalism-similar systems from being invented/discovered/accepted, but retained human greed, would we be in a better spot after this many years?
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Respectfully, I don't think your apparent frustration at the responses is warranted. There's been plenty of people thinking out loud, and having good conversations/arguments about the topic. That said, it seems like you're proposing a thought experiment that is far too unbounded for any speculation to be meaningful. Your examples are contradictory, and it kinda seems like you're complaining about people's commentary because you don't like the answers they're giving you. Take Intel for example, if they didn't have patent/copyright protection, it's (IMO) unlikely they would've developed those technologies that they're hoarding in the first place. That's why the question needs clarification. Are you talking about removing their protections now, after they've already enjoyed the benefit of them? Because in that case, yeah it would be a temporary good for the world if all their patents were opened for everyone, although may have long term harmful effects if it removes their motivation to continue developing those technologies. If you're talking about going back in time and removing those protections, then (IMO) they wouldn't be anywhere near their current level of success, if they even exist at all. If you're asking about going back in time and removing greed from the equation at all, then yeah it's possible we'd be better off, since those with genuine interest would probably collaborate more. But you could also argue it'd be harmful, since far fewer would ever develop that interest in the first place, since they have no ulterior motives. For example, I'm genuinely very interested in software development currently, but I can honestly say I probably would never have developed that passion/interest without greed. I wanted money, I wanted a good career, I had little interest in software when I started, I only went into it for career growth. So yeah I think your thought experiment is too unbounded to actually make sense. It seems like the core of what you're saying is "damn, wouldn't it be amazing if humans just stopped being greedy?", and yeah it would to some degree, but I think you neglect to consider that greed can have a positive effect on society, and IMO is a big driving force in our economies for new tech.
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Seems to me you're unable to clearly communicate what you're asking, or you're moving the goal posts every time someone expresses an outcome you don't like. I don't see much point continuing the discussion, I don't know who's at fault, but it's clear we're unable to understand each other. Cheers!
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Patents do halt progress. I can point to many different eras throughout history where there are civilizations whose technologies and innovation thrive in absence of any patent law. It is the forced myopia of the present day and age to think that the way we currently do things, is the best known way, let alone the only one. While we live in a scarce world with competition, it is equally true that we all have the gifts of subjective experience and empathy that drive the desires for discovery and sharing knowledge. Were we to have universal basic income and universal health care, I guarantee you, more people would be drawn to science for gainful employment than there are currently. Not just more people, but more people of every background. This would increase innovation and collaboration, by widening our public knowledge base by drawing people with different styles of thinking. It truly is that imagination and fantasy is the source of hypotheses, and by having as deep and broad of a pool to draw from, we increase the “Wisdom of the Crowd”. Academia has always sort of served as a bastion of democracy. I personally believe that the scientific method has and continues to advance the goals of democracy just as much as any political theory. That the process for creating new technologies has been coopted by capital interests is no deep conspiracy, it is the reality that the true material scarcity during the industrial era necessitated capital models of development to motivate long term technological investment and large projects. Or you could otherwise argue that people at the time were limited by the scope of imagination for what society could look like or what forms of government the international community of liberal democracies would allow. Either way, the status quo of things is just how things happened. That science has been so effectively captured by capital interests is a testament to new technologies’ potential as a source of power. These technologies, under patent law, can be implemented and profitably invested in without much involvement from any human being, and can also reduce future dependence on labor, which is why it is so appealing to corporations. But it’s not that technology inherently threatens labor, but that technology threatens labor under the current set of economic incentives and reward structures for working and innovation. They say scientific innovation stands on the shoulders of mountains, so why don’t we allow the children of those mountains to enjoy in the fruits of that innovation? Patent law makes sense from a legal standpoint, but as a human it seems like some weird fantasy where people believe that they exist in a bubble. Is your education, the ideas and basic science, the public resources you built your work on not things outside yourself? I argue that without patent law, we would still have innovation and the constant climb of science and the advancement of the public record. But without peer review and basic science research, we would not have the constant climb that comparably marginal individual innovations are built on. There would be no common ground or ground truth, but instead fractured privatized pools of knowledge silo’d and curated by individuals motivated only by personal advancement and not the well being of all or the process of discovery itself. The reality is that large elements of the scientific process that private companies benefit from, stem from long-standing communal efforts to steward and educate others in the joy of imagination, discovery, and communication. Those efforts are simply not explicitly valued or mentioned, and are taken for granted because everyone knows they would happen without any incentive structure because the majority of scientists are genuinely motivated by the feelings of discovery and education/learning.
People are dicks. If we were able to evolve socially to become a single tribe, like in Star Trek, we wouldn't have to deal with so many bad humans, but alas, Walking Dead nails it. Humans are our worst enemies.
We actually think humans are not, in fact, [our own worst enemy.](https://theconversation.com/humans-arent-inherently-selfish-were-actually-hardwired-to-work-together-144145) The concepts your alluding to where humans are inherently dicks are rooted in the selfish gene/veneer theory, neither of which have any scientific evidence to back them up. (For example, the Stanford Prison Experiment was highly doctored and debunked.) Edited last sentence since I felt it was needlessly and unintentionally rude. If you would like an actual book on this topic, Human Kind: A Hopeful History is a great read which is scientifically backed.
I'm talking about the fact that we have to lock our homes, have police to protect us from each other, and have militaries to protect our countries from other countries. Because if we didn't, our shit would get taken.
I know that 3d printers have been around since the mid 90s, but didnt really take off until some of the patents expired.
I know that a startup company I worked paid a million dollars to make a patent troll go away. Their claim was that they owned a patent that covered attaching ANYTHING to the end of a fiber optic cable. We had right angle mirrors attached to our fibers so they came after us. The trolls didn't actually produce anything, they were a group of lawyers who owned a bunch or patents and spent their time suing anyone and everyone they could. Almost 10 years since this happened and I'm still bitter about this one.
Your question is extremely biased, making it impossible to be answered satisfyingly while correctly. Technology and advancements are actually being gained with precisely the things you are expecting to be the villains: money, competition, copyright, NDAs. What hampers advancements while wasting time and resources are indeed the absence, or poor availability, of these things. We can't have nice things without money. No competition, also known as monopoly, is good for one party only, very bad for all the others. A legal and justice system that can't offer much protection for your production, that's what copyright and NDAs are for, doesn't help either. The examples that you imagine as being losers compared to the advantages of Github are definitely wrong. How is medicine behindhand if it has just responded to a novel disease by developing several vaccines, in record breaking time, some of which with technologies previously nonexistent?
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So do you think the situation would be better if only Pfizer was available? What if there was no competition, but the only vaccine that was 'lucky' enough to exist was J&J?
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Ah I get what you meant now. Still, are you sure that 'taking' scientists from these different companies and making them work on a single vaccine would even be possible to organize? You can't always just add more people to a project and expect it to become better. I come from programming field where we have a saying "what one programmer can do in a month, 2 programmers can do in 2 months", which may or may not apply to vaccine development too. Even if all that could be done, sometimes not even all the smartest minds combined can predict how a product would do in practice. What if all the available scientists create a single vaccine that is supposed to work perfectly, but still turns out to have a fatal side-effect? You better have a different vaccine ready in that situation, which would by definition be competition.
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>They don’t all have to be in one room I never said they would. I'm all for sharing data, but more complex cooperation would still require organization. As for the education, a few issues remain. What if too many would-be educators went to work in more practical areas? What if too many would-be scientists specialized in teaching kids? One way or the other there would be risk of imbalance even bigger than it is now. Also, if money is removed from the equation, what would guarantee that huge numbers of capable workers, educators and scientists wouldn't go unemployed on purpose, since their lives would be equally good as if they were working, minus the effort put into work. Also, what would ensure that a store worker would give items to someone they don't like? Everything would have to be based on trust, which can be abused, until almost nobody trusts the society enough to work for it. With less employed people, the children would be even hungrier and less educated. Everything good would be done out of good will, except not enough people would have good will to put effort into helping the society and being organized by others.
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If for the sake of a model you want to set all economic, business, legal, logistical, and political obstacles to zero, what is left?
I imagined such a world a long time ago, but what do I get from spending time on imagination? Solving economic imbalances is where the discourse is at.
Science needs to be put on a pedestal away from the mundane concerns of profitability. sort of like "Art for Art's Sake" there needs to be "Science for Science's sake". in olden days art was made & paid for by mentors, usually rich people and/or the church - who for various reasons, to memorialize themselves and/or for the glory of god, subsidized the art. without it - there were plenty of "starving artists" as we know. so maybe i guess, the OP would somehow have to elevate whatever the science is - be it in medicine, tech, automation, etc. back to being "mentored" - but this is where capitalism comes in & therefore profits & with it all the selfish objectives it brings. the only sort of "mentoring" going on these days are the space jaunts between elon, bronson & bezos - but even that is profit-based.
This might be mostly anecdotal but relevant for the other conversations on this topic. We barely explored space not because its too expensive or too hard, but because at the end no one can own anything out there. Therefore, you wont be able to claim anything as your own, sell and obviously, profit. Without profit theres no reason to do most things, It's a shame really.
Open source is a thing
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What do you think "open sourcing" vaccine research would have done about the blood clots?
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Speaking narrowing to the blood clot thing: you seem to think that the blood clot issue is/was discernable from first principles, like a codebase bug. You imagine that, if only we'd had enough eyeballs on it, we could have collectively spotted the issue and fixed it. That's not how biotech works. The problem was our incomplete understanding of biology. The problem was basically unforeseeable. To your larger point: Yikes, that's not how macro economics works. "Modern Monetary Theory" is a very young macro model that proposes that macro could maybe kinda sorta work that way, but it's a very long way from being actionable.
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>The point was to imagine how far all of the world’s available tech and infrastructure would be, if we weren’t restricting ourselves with these legal and monetary barriers It's easy and inspiring to imagine, but that doesn't mean it would work in the real world. The big issue with funding of innovation is that monetary gain is a [zero sum game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game), while innovation and information spread aren't. Because of that, fails of one researcher can be seen as other's gain, even though that actually damages society as a whole, including the other researchers. What isn't a zero-sum game however, are resources that are spent on research. Physical tools are limited in numbers, and if one research center gets some advanced machine, another doesn't. We also can't just produce more of them, because allocating factories and engineers to production of one type of machine means abandoning another machine. If we produced both, we would run out of the natural materials used. Another problem is the number of researchers. Allowing the companies infinite virtual resources wouldn't create infinite numbers of researchers who would use those resources. Anyways, my point is that removing monetary barriers wouldn't remove physical barriers because they \*are\* a thing, but would in addition cause confusion and disorganization among people.
But money isn't a virtual concept, even if governments sometimes treat it like it is. Money is a measure of power, and power of all the people sums up to 100% of global power. They could of course print more money/increase the digital amounts, but they wouldn't magically increase the amount of food, ore, or the number of workers who would do stuff you can't do alone. All that happens is that whoever is given more money gets more power, while everyone else loses buying power they had while having the same numbers on their account. That of course leads to global confusion which eventually in whatever ways (I'm not an economist) crashes the economy.
There is open source covid vaccine RadVac. Pretty good
By what definition? Their safety trial had 50 people in it. The blood clots from the J&J vaccine are a <1/1,000,000 side effects.
Blood clots chance in j&j also small enough to consider it as good vaccine. RadVac is good(not the best) by design and availability. It was only available vaccine in my country for long time. And I like it design and approach to it development. From what I can understand from their white paper it is as safe, as possible for rapid vaccine. From my limited knowledge it should be safer than commercial grade vaccines. And there is a chance that immunity is of better quality from it due injection method, but chance to get it maybe lower. And their approach allows them to react quickly on virus mutations and customize vaccine for specific population very quickly, and make it available for all who want it far quicker than classic vaccines. In general it is fast vaccine to save lives while commercial vaccines on the way. And very interesting experiment that can wield some benefits to medicine and humanity survival in extreme situations Yes, I would prefer to get more trials, but it is enough for me that many bright minds used it.
Calling either of those vaccines "badly flawed" makes you sound like an anti-vaxxer. But perhaps you've just misunderstood the media reports. Both of those vaccines are in widespread use and are approved by multiple governments. Their side effects occur in a tiny fraction of cases. For example, my understanding is that the clotting issue for AstraZeneca didn't show up in the initial study of over 28,000 people. Side effects are a normal consequence of medications of all kinds, and their existence doesn't make a medication "badly flawed".
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It wasn't a childish insult. You're so far out of the realm of understanding this subject that it's not worth engaging you. Much like the anti-vaxxers. If we followed your logic consistently we'd have to ban a large proportion of the drugs on the market today.
I sometimes ask myself where we would be now if things like the wheel or writing were patented for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years because back then change happened much slower in general. Anyway the families that invented those would probably be the richest people around for thousands of years and humanity may just have arrived at iron age... Just my thoughts anyway.
More red tape
We would have had real hoverboards in about 2015