No. Pharmeceutical companies spend these years TESTING their drugs, because the FDA forced them to. Developing a new drug does not usually take years. Creativity is spontaneous. See the “Aha! effect.”

“A non-patent system would give them no encouragement to even look for the drugs that they later bring to the market.”

Reducing the patent term to one year is adequate, giving our current advertising capabilities and increased demand for drugs due to population growth. Those that need drugs badly do not want to wait for a year until the patent expires.

“inventors and enterpreneurs”
Not all of them. Patents helped us start our Industrial Revolution, but we do not need them now, because of increased demand for patented products due to population growth and GDP per capita. This is not like the 1800s. We have advertising capabilities. In the 1800s, advertising for the same product is one million times more expensive because there were no fast advertising methods. You have to transport to advertise your invention in the 1800s.

“AIDS is still incurable” I know. But these are some curable drugs that are too expensive because of pharmaceutical monopolies.

Why would they? Entrepreneurship is based on opportunities and not the existence of patents. Inventors would still enjoy the profits that come by being the first to market – the only difference being that competition would appear sooner, and that an inventor would not have an incentive to lose precious time and money defending patents.

A non-patent system would give [Pharmaceuticals] no encouragement to even look for the drugs that they later bring to the market.

That statement stems from a misunderstanding of how drugs come into existence in the US. The high cost of developing a new drug comes from the ridiculously complicated regulations imposed by the FDA. The patent system only makes the cost of introduction harder for competing companies, reducing the number of new drugs in the market. You part from a ceteris paribus fallacy but I remind you that things are NOT equal, and that there is NOT a free market for drugs.

That’s a daring statement as to make a similar one elsewhere without qualifications would be regarded as ‘Socialism’. In other words, that statement steers rather close to a ‘positive duty’ than a ‘negative right’. Furthermore, how is refraining to supply people with AIDS drugs ‘killing’ them? AIDS is still incurable and these drugs rather prolong the lives of the victims. Perhaps, a similar statement can be made for DDT? If those in the West don’t like DDT and aren’t going to make it or ship it to Africa so what? The real problem would be if other countries, especially in Africa, are forbidden by the West to make and ship their own DDT (and likewise others who are forbidden to make and ship their own medicine).

As you may have noticed, patent holders do not every advertise their inventions.

Our patents killed about millions of people. Life-saving medicine is too expensive for people to buy. Like the example that Africans with AIDS cannot buy medicine.

As you see, the “practical implementation” of an invention only would occur after the patent expired. If the patent is not expired, the price of the invented product is too expensive that it is equivalent to not using the invention.

Intellectual property can be enforced if and only if fraud can be enforced. Internet fraudsters on eBay cannot usually be punished. Trade secrets and open source licenses are not entirely enforceable in anarchism.

All software would remain public domain in anarchism. Copyleft is a kind of intellectual property. Public domain would undermine software innovation, as open source developers would make it close sourced, instead of releasing the source after they improved it.

However, the 20-year patent term is enforced by international treaties.

Shouldn’t the proper “spur” for innovation be necessity, rather than artificial legal obstacles? What if the crank had been the best way to go? Your example only works because it wasn’t.

Oh, rubbish. Watt himself faced an obstacle from someone who had patented the crank – and it spurred him to invent the sun and planet motion to achieve the same effect a different way. Likewise the Otto patents inspired the invention of the differential internal combustion engine.

Neither of those are in common use now, precisely because the patented ways are actually better. The problem isn’t that patents hinder innovation – they actually promote it – but that they distort things, so that the inventiveness goes into circumvention rather than actual improvement.

Notice also the bait and switch, common at least since Microsoft started blowing its own horn, of talking up innovation rather than invention. It’s actually the latter that increases productive capacity; putting inventions into wider use is innovation, and certainly it’s what realises the gains, but with competition the next firm can do that job equally well – once the invention is available and accessible, not artificially held back and made into a quasi-monopoly.

This study is suspect as it dealt with a minute segment of society, which basically has a natural patent. In 1851 and 1876, I doubt there were enough scientific research to replicate somebody’s medical break-through if that inventor chose to keep it secret. The article even states that secrecy was effective in restraining duplication. However, in the present we do not have that luxury. It would be great, if all we had to do is not tell anybody the biological composition of the item to prevent them replicating our invention. However that is not the case. Scientist can easily ascertain the composition of the item today and mass produce it.