Can You Copyright Viagra?

by on January 12, 2006

James DeLong analogizes pharmaceutical and software patents:

The general principle is that if governments remove the incentives for invention and innovation, then (surprise!) it does not happen. This applies to software and other creative products as well as pharma.

This is a plausible point until you realize that software is already protected by copyright law. And for a variety of reasons I’ve argued before, software patents have a lot more flaws than software copyright. I have yet to see anyone explain why software patents are necessary, given that copyright law appears to give plenty of protection for precisely the same investments.

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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