Its a fun exercise to try to imagine what the medical/drug industry would look like sans patents. If it was infeasible for a corporation to spend many years and (m|b)illions of dollars to develop a drug because as soon as you did a competitor would copy it, would we still have drugs? If we did who would make them?

In the future advances in science and computer modeling should make drug development much more rapid than it is today. This could vastly lower the cost to bring drugs to market and put drug development easily within the grasp of a large non-profit organization.

Imagine that instead granting a private company the exclusive right to sell a drug, that instead everyone invested in its development and upon its discovery its formula was shared freely. For most drugs, the synthesis is not a major component of the cost. This would lead to rapid deployment of the drug at very low cost to those who need it.

If there was no copyright law, you can be sure there would still be drugs! And perhaps health insurance companies would be interested in drug development. Fewer sick people and cheaper medicine should lead to greater profits.