US IP Law Comparisons with Other Countries?

jpalk asks: "Something I've been wondering about lately is how US intellectual property laws stack up with those from other industrialized nations? Specifically, I've been wondering about things like the durations of copyrights and patents and the number of works that are patented/copywrighted every year vs. the number of such that expire. I know where to find (some) of that information for the US, but I'm clueless about where to find that for other countries." How many countries have IP laws that differ significantly from the framework established by the International Copyright Laws?

Comments

Amerika vs the world

[lrichardson]

The original question was how does US law compare? In short, the US system grants longer patents, covers a lot more territory, and allows more broadness in it's patents.

The length is pretty simple to explain - longer patents benefit the corporation (or, in less than 1 percent, the individual) holding the patent. The US politicians take whopping bribes...er, PAC and soft money, and repay their benefactors by extending the patents.

I'm not up on my European law, but England had two points that kept the patent system a lot less corrupt - first, many patents were shot down simply because they were viewed as either 'stifling legitimate competition', or against public interest. The second was that it used to cost a heck of a lot to actually patent something, making spurious and incremental patents much less prevelent than the US.

The second point is what is allowable. To give the simplest example, Europe won't allow you to patent life forms, while it's big business in the US. (Go Stargazers!)

Finally, while the trend is slowing, the US allowed a given patent to cover far more than England (and, AFAIK, Europe). Look at Bell's patent, and read about just how much ended up paying to use it, for a case study in legal elegance. In England, a patent could be struck down if any part of it was invalid (i.e. you patent a new car engine, but forget to specifically exclude the spark plugs, tough). The US _does_ have similar laws ... just that they rarely see the light of day. The US, geez, there was some guy who had patented 'sending music over wires using modulated electricity'. And you thought RIAA was bad!

Finally, the US is exactly like England and Europe in one regard - the patent system, since it's inception, has become just another place where corporations (and individuals) fight to establish dominance. The practice of 'licensing' highly questionable patents to a few of your close business partners (for under-the-table considerations), then going after your actual opponents in court ("But your honor, these seven other highly respected software companies are paying licensing fees, Sun is obviously just being criminal!) dates back to the first few years after the patent office came into existence.

USPTO discusses this.

[flossie]

The US patent office has a number of FAQs, one of which discusses differences between US patent law and the rest of the world. You can read it here.

-- flossie
http telnet

Droit Moral

[interiot]

According to this paper, copyrights in France and Germany have a different philosophical basis than in the US or elsewhere.

One posssible basis for copyrights is "natural law", where an author has rights to their works forever. (eg. IP is very similar to physical property)

Another is "instrumentalist theory", where copyrights give an author some control for a limited time, to induce authors to create works.

Then there's "droit moral" (supported by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), which says something along the lines of: "property is acquired not necessarily by labor, but rather by one's joining of his individual Will to some object external to the self. As a result of this process, the thing possessed comes to embody the owner's personality". As a result, if someone disrespects/parodies/any-action, it's said that they're partly doing that to the author. "no strange work be presented as his, but that his own work not be presented in a changed form." Also, some followers of this theory separate authors' rights into two classes: alienable and inalienable. This seems to be a nice compromise between the two previous theories.

I don't know how accurate or current the paper is. But it's an interesting difference, IMHO.
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