If a musician doesn’t have the right to their own work, it’s because someone offered to pay them for the rights and they accepted.

Is that in their favor? I think so, considering the alternative is to not get paid and not have rights to their work.

i mean, if you aren't at least peripherally aware of the ways in which people can be coerced into accepting contracts i don't know what to tell you. record companies are pretty notorious for exploiting musicians, and musicians have been complaining about it for many decades. same thing with writers, and vfx artists, and game designers, and on and on and on.

If you want a clinical trial that proves a particular drug can actually help patients, you will need to find a company to pay for it. The government almost never pays for clinical trials (I think the COVID vaccine might have been an exception). Clinical trials are far more expensive than basic science, and patents are the carrot to get the private sector to pay for them.

i'm aware of how it works, but it's now how it has to work. i would prefer they did do all that publicly, and there is nothing that prevents them from doing so. the cost in human lives that comes with entrusting life-saving medications to profit-motivated executives is immense, especially for drugs that treat illnesses that are endemic to poorer nations. in any case, US tax dollars funded every new pharmaceutical in the last decade, and i don't really care who foots the bill for what part of drug development when exactly zero new drugs would exist without public scientific progress serving as the foundation for these new technologies.