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Reason on IP Protection and Creativity
rnturn writes "A long but interesting article over at Reasononline discusses a paper written by a pair of economists and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (!) and the reactions to it of several other economists. A snippet from the article: 'Moreover, U.S. court decisions in the 1980s that strengthened patent protection for software led to less innovation. "Far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity," Maskin and Bessen write, "these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most."' Not exactly news to most readers but it appears that their paper is making waves in economic circles."
GameTab - Game Reviews Database
Boldrin and Levine's original paper is available here (pdf).
I already subscribe to Reason, but you can give it a try with a free sample issue (as usual, if you don't like it, just write "cancel" on the bill). Their archive also has the full text from all issues up to Jan 2003, in case you're undecided about subscribing.
Now if only their page (or their staff blog) were more Plucker friendly ;). (Plucker is a free offline web browser for Palm)
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
That Crazypatents site is a gold mine of hilarity.
1 .gif
http://www.crazypatents.com/images/Large/4044405-
Here is something just like that idea actually, but it's implemented in a truly ingenious way. They have an image of a fly in the urinal which looks real and so people will automatically aim for it.
Oh, and I actually came across GameTab the other day. Great site, I've found it very useful. I'm looking forward to Freelancer right now, but think I'm going to wait until the reviews start coming in.
"...it appears that their paper is making waves in economic circles."
I'm extremely happy to hear this. You can't imagine how upset the issue about patents makes me when I keep hearing about more protection, stronger laws, another lawsuit against infringement, another idiotic patent issued, and more power to the large coporations that in reality due some of the least amount of innovation, especially considering their size, power, and wealth. Good to see the issue finally coming out besides just in court suppressing the little guy. I read most of the paper a few days ago, well said, and its good to see such a long article discussing the issue on Reason.com. I must say that the issue scares a lot of people. It is because the elimination of such strong laws giving an individual or corporation ownership of an idea would in effect help bridge the gap between rich and poor. Scary isn't it? The idea would also cause a major shift in economic structure in various industries that have relied on using intellectual property as a means of profit or part of their business. Like on the front of "Programming Perl" says, "There is more than one way to do it." Yes, the current system works, but how well? Does the constant threat of piracy and increase in spending to fight it a sign of an efficient system. I sure don't think so.
Question everything.
That's because it's danish.
"There are cars on the street tonight".
(Yes, he was pulling your leg, how sad for him that a former enemy (I'm from Sweden) exposed his nefarious plans! =)
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
It's not French but Danish - well, at least the *words* are Danish. a literal translation is; "There are cars on the stripe tonight". And no, it makes almost no sense in Danish either...
Here
It's actually from march 2002. It's a 30-page academic paper with differential equations and other nice stuff, for the impatient I have reproduced the abstract:
ABSTRACT: We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In fact, established wisdom claims monopoly power to be instrumental for innovation and sees the nonrivalrous nature of ideas as a natural conduit to increasing returns. The results here challenge the positive description of previous models and the normative conclusion that monopoly through copyright and patent is socially beneficial.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
First off, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are too large precicely because of intellectual property. I saw this happen once when I was working at a fab-facuility. It was bought out, and pretty much shut down, not because it couldn't make a good profit, but because the buyer bought it to corner a strategic market using its patent holdings. Second off, if you and everyone else loose say a million worth of IP, but in return gain access to a trillion worth of IP - then this is not a net loss for anyone. In fact, it would likely create an innovation and business explosion.
The traditional pro-patent argument goes like this:
Inventors are solitary geniuses who toil in garage laboratories to create helpful new machines. They can eventually sell these and make a well-deserved fortune, but only if no large company can sneak a look at the idea first. Large companies have a pre-existing advtange in capacity for production, distribution, and marketing. They could glut the market far quicker than the original owner ever could, so he needs legal protection against them.
Whether or not you accept this argument for patents as having been valid one or two centuries ago (check out this series of books for a flawed dramatization of those benefits circa 1900), today additional problems with that argument have become clear.
The one which most interests me is that there is an additional pre-existing advantage a large company will have over a "lone inventor": an advantage in capacity for lawyers. That means they can file patents more quickly and more frequently than any individual can. Well in advance of knowing if a particular idea is workable or not, they can patent it- so, just in case someone figures out how to make it run, they can snatch it back from him.
Organizations like IBM and Kodak have mixed teams of lawyers and quasi-engineers registering 1000s of patents per year. There's a fair chance that if you come up with a clever idea to use in your next project, somewhere there's a mass-produced corporate patent out there, waiting to squash you if you ever attract the company's attention.
FWIW, you can find more of Levin's work at various places. Prof. Danny Quah also has some thoughts on the subject.
"He wrested the world's whereabouts from the heavens And locked the secret in a pocketwatch." - Dava Sobel
That's closer to Danish (or maybe Norwegian) than French... Or is there some hidden sect in France that uses Danish as a secret language?
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
When will people understand, that bigdrugco is congress; we the taxpayers PAY for the majority of the research and after the research is done, the government sell the bigdrugco the patent(cent's on the dollar meaning the patent cost is a fraction of what us taxpayers paid in R&D for the drug to come to market). Of coarse, congress and their insider friends, has their pockets full of drug company stock. This is how the "free market" works. If you are on the inside(congressional access), then you'll know what laws are being to benifit a select few, so you know what stocks to buy. I hope the market goes up in flames!, The LIARS CANNOT KEEP UP THIS SHERADE, after torching the port authoritys' treasured gem.
But Reason is a good magazine, and its online version is even better. I find them to be more intellectually honest - by far - than the Cato Institute, they have a good sense of humor, excellent writers, and are generally fair-minded. And I'm not the only person who thinks so; a lot of people who don't subscribe to all of Reason's views still give it props as a source of writing, especially in the last year or so.