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Critic of Software Patents Wins Nobel Prize in Economics
doom writes "You've probably already heard that the Nobel Prize for Economics was given to three gents who were working on advances in mechanism design theory. What you may not have heard is what one of those recipients was using that theory to study: 'One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress.' Here's one of Maskin's papers on the subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).
Honestly any economist who doesn't recognize the value of creating and protecting intellectual property rights in an information economy is a POORLY trained economist.
Yes and I am going to take YOUR word for it over a published, Nobel Prize winning economist...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
-1 disinformative for you there.
Sweden has never been socialist. It has, during nearly all of the previous century, followed a policy of the "Middle Path" choosing the elements from the free market where they are best applied and elements from socialism where they are best applied.
Nowadays it is following a Bush/ Bliar/Thatcher-style neoliberalism with heavy emphasis on buracracy, privatization and corporate welfare.
Go look at the statistics. During the years Sweden prospered economically, had low debt or a surplus, had good services such as health care, low unemployment, it was during the periods of closest adherence to the middle path. Look at the times where services are few and of poor quality, the budget is in shambles, lots of debt and high unemployment, it is during times when deviation from the middle path has been strongest -- such as the last 15 years.
The Swedish banks are the worst examples of failure of unrestrained capitalism. They have collapsed and been bailed out twice. However, normally when one buys out the debt from a failed company, the buyer then owns the company. Stupidly in the last case, the buyer (the Swedish government) simply handed the banks back to the same asshats that bankrupted them in the first places. These are the clowns that then pick the recipients for the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel. To try to lend credibility to their scam they, to their credit, have schmoozed into the Nobel celebration. However, the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel is to the Nobel Prize what films like Ernest in the Army is to fine cinema.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.