Quote from: onarchy on April 04, 2011, 06:56:04 PM

Quote from: wb3 on April 04, 2011, 06:43:10 PM

I am in favor of the Aspirin process. Aspirin is in the public domain, but yet companies still make money off of making Aspirin. Anyone who doesn't think its price is worth it, can go to the Willow Tree and eat the appropriate amount of Bark.

People will pay for the convenience of not going to the willow tree, but will do so, if costs get out of hand. <--- Piracy defined.

Sure, once Aspirin is out there in the public domain (i.e. its novelty has worn off) then there is no problem with this. But what if someone actually spent 1 billion dollars researching and inventing Aspirin and after 10 years of hard work and lots of investment they finally start selling Aspirin only to find out that the company across the street has used one week to analyze the contents of their Aspirin and are now making their own version of Aspirin. And since they didn't spend 1 billion dollars and 10 years they can now sell the product at a fraction of the cost! Wow, free market competition! So the inventor -- the company who spent one billion dollars and 10 years on cutting edge research taking a huge risk and building up huge debt -- end up going broke, whereas the business across the street makes a fortune because they were able to make a "competing" product at "more competitive price." Please tell me that you understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with this, that it is grossly unfair that the hero who used all those resources to make the world a better place goes bankrupt while the parasite across the street who has done NO research and invested NOTHING gets all the profit.

Ahh... but they didn't. They made the mistake of marketing a natural product and tried to make a fortune. This is why drug companies go and find natural medicines, take it back to the lab and synthesize the natural medicine into a patented medicine. Which is fine if they want to do that, but they should also show what the Natural Medicine is.

The new Holistic Medicine process is coming on strong (fish oil, etc...) because it is Natural Medicine without the synthesis of it. It is cheaper to boot. The FDA are removing Fish Oil from Nutrient stores for claiming it is the same chemicals of an Official Medicine. The FDA is protecting who? The public or the company? They should be removing the snake oils, not protecting profits.