this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
1819 points (98.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
6518 readers
3534 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is how to manufacture insulin a trade secret? Is that why there’s no black market for it?
There literally is a black market for it. My city, Las Vegas is littered with handmade signs and flyers of saying they buy and sell insulin and diabetic supplies.
Insulin is a bad example because its manufacturing methods are relatively old, but the entire point of patents is to avoid trade secrets. The idea is that inventors share how they do something exactly, and their invention gets legally protected for a certain amount of time before it becomes available for everyone. The problem is capitalism is capitalism, and so it incentivizes abuse, so corporations will flood the system with patents that have as little detail as legally allowed and try to apply them in the broadest way possible. The pharmaceutical industry in particular also seems to have a problem with companies patenting minor tweaks on their products when the previous patent is about to expire to keep a monopoly, and then dialing up the propaganda against their previous product up to 11.