> Without this "privilege" a company has no incentive to develop anything new
How much are they developing vs how much are they marketing? A lot of pharmacological studies are preformed by public universities and an insignificant amount of money that many think goes to "research" instead goes to "do you have <made_up_disease>? talk to your doctor about <our_new_drug?>" type commercials and other marketing.
> Try this for a comparison - Germany declares that all software sold in their country should be priced at $1 or less.
If that software will end up saving lives, then it should be sold for $1 or less and the government should develop/buy it/fund it.
Or how about another comparison. Open source software is priced at $0. Are people writing it? Why? They shouldn't according to your logic. So maybe someone will bother developing and researching life saving drugs without being granted monopoly on its distribution.
Finding the chemical is a very small part of the cost. Try setting up animal tests, phase I clinical trial, phase II clinical trial, phase III clinical trial, years of follow up, hiring people to put together documents to get regulatory approval, post market monitoring of the drug, getting information about your drug to physicians...
But it is also not infinitely cheaper. It involves time commitment. Large projects are thousands and thousands of man months, and you can download and build it by paying $0. People seems to be willing to spend a significant amount of time for something that is distributed for $0.
It is effectively infinitely easier. Hackers don't need multi-year studies, trials and FDA approvals before pushing code to Github. The fact that there are no "open source drugs" should give you a hint that the analogy you're trying to draw is fundamentally flawed.
How much are they developing vs how much are they marketing? A lot of pharmacological studies are preformed by public universities and an insignificant amount of money that many think goes to "research" instead goes to "do you have <made_up_disease>? talk to your doctor about <our_new_drug?>" type commercials and other marketing.
> Try this for a comparison - Germany declares that all software sold in their country should be priced at $1 or less.
If that software will end up saving lives, then it should be sold for $1 or less and the government should develop/buy it/fund it.
Or how about another comparison. Open source software is priced at $0. Are people writing it? Why? They shouldn't according to your logic. So maybe someone will bother developing and researching life saving drugs without being granted monopoly on its distribution.