[Brutha]

I think if the capital is there, its going to be invested.

It's about where the capital will get invested.
Does it go into a bigger advertising budget or does it go into research?

At the moment there talk about having a goal that 3% of the GDP goes into research and there people who hope to archive it in the coming years.
Advertising is a zero sum game. Mining more resources is also no way to go forever because we have a finitive amount of resources on the planet.
The idea is that in the long run the amount of money that gets invested in research determines growth of wealth.
Therefore there's public policy to create incentives for people to invest more money into R&D.

Now there're different patents. For example I don't think that software patents are needed. Software doesn't have research costs in the same way that the development of new drugs or new gene sequencing has research costs.

I also don't want patents on genes because I don't think that there should be public policy incentives of the kind of things that Monsanto does.

Then there might also be reasons to have different patents lengths. There a few different ways to create incentives for research investment.
You can directly pay for research with tax money through a grant process. You can create tax deductions to get companies to invest more into R&D.
Then you can do patents for different field with a variety of time lengths.

For different areas you have also other things that you can do with laws. You can reduce liabilities of producers, reduce bureaucracy etc.

Good public policy should use a mix of those things.

Implied was one argument people have for patents, that patents are needed as an incentive for people to come up with ideas. Which is just ludicrus, ideas happen all the time.

Most people don't know how innovation works. Most ideas that look good on paper don't work.
Well, of course my idea is different, we will see in two years who it turns out
On the same token, not every idea that works looks good on paper.

At the moment there maybe 18 companies trying to get third generation sequencing working with will reduce the price of gen sequencing by 10x-100x in one/two years.
15 of those companies will probably not make enough money to refinance their investments.
But there might be one of those companies that grows to a billion dollar company. That dream gets investors to provide funds for the companies. If there wouldn't be patents those companies probably couldn't dream of becoming billion dollar companies.