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.