US Supreme Court rules against software patents

Yet it still took more than 5 billion to develop this drug. It's actually considered cheap these days for new drugs. Lots of companies spend more money without any results.

> Do a *real* risk analysis and allow dangerous drugs for serious illnesses to be trialled much more quickly and with far fewer self-defeating safeguards - if I stand a 10% chance of dying from the illness, and a 1% chance of dying from the drug, guess which one I'm going to choose!
Such regulations are already in place. Critical drugs can be fast-tracked by FDA and approved even if significant side-effects are present.

It still doesn't help a lot. Clinical tests are not just a formality to get an approval - a lot of drugs (50% is a commonly cited number) fail during the tests.

> And lastly, maybe allow companies to carve out research niches as "protected areas" - if a company does "blue-sky" research into a drug family, then they get exclusive rights for say 10 years after the drug gets FDA (or equivalent) approval.
That is called 'a patent'.

> But at the end of the day, while your figures may be impressive, you still haven't provided any evidence that that research is value for money. All the evidence says that, even measured in $Billions, most pharma research isn't!
Can you provide actual examples of pharma research? I do, since we work with drug discovery companies.

The amount of money spent on 'useless' research is pretty much zero. Almost all of the R&D is spent on serious diseases. And pharma companies actually spend more on R&D than just about any other industry.

I'm not quite sure how seriously I should take a comment trying to claim that an abstract concept and a physical object are equivalent. That's rather like seeing no difference between a real object and a photograph of the object.

> It looks like a physical object did (or at least close enough), it behaves like a physical object (at least it tries too), so why couldn't we treat it as a physical object in a cyberspace?

Your idea of "close enough" isn't very demanding if you think a pattern of RGB pixels on a flat touchscreen "looks like" or "behaves like" a physical object. From one point of view, perhaps, and only if you don't look very closely or try to interact with it as you would a physical object. The means of interaction are somewhat familiar (apply pressure and slide your finger to change the state), but the similarity ends there. What you're interacting with is the touchscreen, a physical object in its own right; the slider is just an illusion, and a very shallow one at that.

> Basically the question is: what separates bolt on the iPhone screen from physical bolt patentened 300 years ago if we treat "computer/software combination as a black box"?

Well, one is a physical bolt, and the other (sans the black box) mainly consists of a touchscreen which can digitize arbitrary 2D input and output arbitrary video. It might be better to ask what they have in common.

> They are not completely identical but that's because one is done from metal alloy and other is done from shapes and textures. But that's the difference between cyberspace and real space, nothing more, nothing less.

In other words, the difference is nothing more or less than *everything*. Even in the physical world, something "done from metal alloy" and something "done from" smoke are going to be so different as to be incomparable. Something that exists only as a transient pattern of electrical signals--not significantly different from thoughts in someone's head, in the end--has even less in common.

Print out a program's source code. Lay it on the floor. Wait for it to do something or cause something to happen. You'll die first.

Oh, wait. It's source code. So compile it. Place the drive (rotating or flash) that contains the compiled program on the floor and wait for it to do something. You'll still die waiting.

Like words printed on a piece of paper, software is an intangible idea. You cannot touch it. Like a novel, you can only imagine it. Without something real and physical to follow its instructions, software can do nothing.

Patents apply to real, physical, tangible things that do something real and tangible. Copyrights apply to virtual, non-physical, intangible ideas that can only be imagined. Software lies in the realm of ideas. And like all ideas, software can be copyrighted. Not patented.

The software that computes the cure time of rubber based on temperature measurements cannot be patented because it is merely an idea. A device that measures the temperature of the curing rubber and turns off the heating element once curing is calculated to be complete can be patented because it does something (turns off the heat).