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The Burden of Intellectual Property Rights On Clean Energy Technologies
Lasrick writes If climate change is to be addressed effectively in the long run, nations of all descriptions must pursue mitigation and adaptation strategies. But poor countries face a potential hurdle when it comes to clean-energy technologies—most of the relevant intellectual property is held in the rich world. Many observers argue that it's unfair and unrealistic to expect massive energy transformations in the developing world unless special allowances are made. Yet intellectual property rights are intended in part to spur the very innovation on which climate mitigation depends. This article is the first post in a roundtable that debates this question: In developing countries, how great an impediment to the growth of low-carbon energy systems does the global intellectual property rights regime represent, and how could the burdens for poor countries be reduced?
Is anybody even pretending that patents exist anymore for anything other than lining corporate and lawyer pockets? Just tell them to piss off because the planet is more important.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I read the summary and thought "wow, this is really stupid". Then I read the article......and confirmed that thought.
A bunch of generalizations and false arguments....."Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that....". No, they don't necessarily make those arguments.
The early United States ignored patents issued abroad once upon a time...
"we have to kill batm^Hmonsanto."
they stand in the way of world progress. fight a war with THEM, then maybe the world can have a chance to feed all its people.
every time I think of monsanto, I get really angry. dammit.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Given that China, the US and the EU are together responsible for more than 50% of the worldwide CO2 emissions, I would expect that the Intellectual Property to combat climate change is right where it is needed. Saying that taking action against climate change is hurdled by poor countries not having the intellectual rights to the necessary technology silently suggests that poor countries are part of the climate change problem, which is absolutely not true.
I've heard a lot of lame excuses on why nothing is being done concerning climate change, but whoever thought of this one deserves a cookie.
Africa is a very energy rich continent. The UN, Wold Bank, IEA have all given billions to the governments of these countries for "green energy projects". The majority of the monies have been stolen. Government corruption is the largest hurdle to development in Africa. From the IEA report released October 2014, "Africa has long been plagued by the resource curse, where abundant oil, gas and minerals in places like Equatorial Guinea or the Republic of Congo have made a select few rich, led to widespread corruption and left the majority of citizens poor. The energy resources have also sparked conflict in countries such as Sudan and Nigeria, and have contributed to years of coups and political unrest. That trend is set to continue, the IEA report said, unless countries tackle the range of problems that hinder the energy sector, from widespread oil theft (worth $5 billion a year in Nigeria) to electricity tariffs across the region, which are among the highest in the world. Corruption, too, remains a “major barrier” to investment in some countries." Africa need to solve its governance and security issues before declaring the only solution is the erosion of my property rights.
Except that patents are good for 20 years, unless renewed. So I don't think is true.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Why Peak oil has peaked, what six times now? There's one that keeps happening! Sorry I don't have any links, but it's common knowledge!
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Africa would benefit little from free IP since it mostly lacks the means to manufacture sophisticated technology. Africa makes use of clean energy technology the same way the use other technology. They buy it already manufactured from more advanced regions. No patent license is required to deploy a solar array.
China could manufacture. But China also has the resources to license the IP and they own IP themselves. Would free IP allow China to deploy clean energy technology faster? A little. But mostly it would allow China to demolish First World competition much faster.
The title of this post refers to "intellectual property". There is no such thing. There are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. But none of these is property. If they were we would not need a special part of the US Constitution to deal with these things (Article 1, Section 8). Because none of this is "property" it is not covered by property law.
And that's the problem. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks exist to further innovation. They represent a monopoly limited in time and held by the innovator who created the thing that is patentable, copyrightable, or tradmarkable. But when we treat those temporary monopolies as property that can be bought and sold, inherited and used as collateral, we have destroyed the impetus to innovation and replaced it with an impetus to profit even at the peril of innovation.
And so we have the ridiculous spectacle of a copyright extended and extended ... even beyond the lifetime of the innovator. How does a copyright encourage creativity in a dead person? The solution to all of this is simply to return to the original short terms of these monopolies and not to allow property law, buying and selling of rights, to insert it's corrupting hand into the crucible of creativity.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
What we really need to do is sit down and talk about whether we merely need to stop abuses of the patent system, or need to scrap it altogether and in the meantime do what we can to stop the most egregous abuses of the system. We also need to sit down and have the same talk about the economic system in general.
http://www.theguardian.com/new...
lots of it, I own the sun.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It peaked in Texas in the 1980's.
It has passed peak for nearly a decade so far.
Peak oil is when supply loses its elasticity because it's all hard to exploit remnants. Think of the last bit of ketchup in the bottle. When the bottle was new, it was easy to get a nice dollop out on your dinner, just tip and shake a bit. Then you had to start to smack the bottle, but it was still easy to get a decent dollop. When it's mostly empty, you can STILL get a full measure of what you want out of it, but you're now looking like you're giving a frantic hand-job to the bottle. Eventually you're leaving the bottle upside-down and using a knife to get at the last dregs.
We're at the "frantic hand-job" stage. Peak is well past.
Short of abolition (the best solution), use eminent domain, like some countries are finally doing with big pharma.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wow....a coherent analogy that wasn't about cars on /.
I am shocked. Also, the "frantic hand-job" part was quite a humorous yet accurate metaphor as well. Are you sure you arnn't from an alternate reality or something?
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Your analogy has an issue: traditional drilling can only extract a small fraction ( 5%) of the oil from a field, and only from a specific, relatively rare type of field. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing makes extracting oil from shale (a porous but low permeability rock) both economical and extremely effective. I'm not a petroleum engineer, but my understanding is that the perfection of these techniques has started a revolution in oil and gas production, and that traditional oil reserve figures are now nearly meaningless.
Excellent. Your property has caused injury to me and many others, now that the owner has been identified you can expect a class action lawsuit.
I don't read AC A human right
Petrol companies have been buying up alternative energy patents and sitting on them since the 60s.
Besides Chevron owning NiMH battery patents, what other examples can you cite?
Because I can cite a big fat counterexample. Lithium Ion batteries strong enough to power a car were developed by Exxon.
http://www.chron.com/business/article/Exxon-to-unveil-hybrid-car-battery-breakthrough-1811103.php
For those of you worried about patent filings in poor countries, here's a bit of an anecdote.
I'm the inventor of a technology that resulted in a product that captured 99% of the market worldwide and sales of over a billion dollars a year. Did it while working for a large multinational, so didn't get but a couple thousand dollars as a bonus.
When deciding where to patent, the decision was US, Europe, Japan, and a couple other countries. BRICS weren't even a consideration. It costs a crap-ton of money to file patents, and even billion dollar products cut cost if it can.
The logic is that you don't have to block every possible market. Just the big ones. They will ignore the small markets as if they had patents.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I was genuinely curious.
You wrote "IP should no longer be respected." I'll bet a dollar that your income is dependent on IP laws.
We do dry (sarcastic) wit well.
Makes up for having too dirty a sense of humour generally.
To smaddox, fracking is the "Frantic hand job" stage.
If it were not expensive to do, then it would have been done in the 1970's and 80's in the USA. Peak oil had to jack the price up significantly before horizontal drilling became economic, and fracking is still not returning any useful economic benefit except to those who pumped the idea up, got VC and got out before drilling started. It had nothing to do with perfection of technique (much like hand jobs) but with a large expected pay-off (ditto).
Nope. You did not include a single actual link. Try again: I'm looking for 2 (minimum) pairs of links. First link of each pair needs to be to a prediction, and the second — to evidence of that prediction materializing.
The texts in each pair must be at least 5 years apart (that is, you do not "win" by predicting next day's weather).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I believe that in the US, it's 20 years, period. No renewal.
Disclaimer: IANAPA
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Because that is what it really is. Intellectual Monopoly is not compatible with property rights. You either own your property and are free to transform it and sell it or you don't own it. Someone saying I can't configure my property is only possible with a government granted monopoly and has no basis in property rights.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Couldn't poor countrys simply ignore intelectual property rights? Don't they have sovergnty? Is this a stupid question?
How will industrialized nations cope when they finally realize that the least of us will have to go as well as the highest among us if the world is to survive? Sort of biblical isn't it?
It is probably not by owning IP. If he is like most people, he works, gets paid for the hours worked, that's it. No ongoing rent for the work done by his great grandfather up to 75 year after he died.
Companies can still be paid to develop stuff for other entities, paid for running servers, they don't need to release source code, paid for support of software, you will probably get a premium if you developed it.
Plenty of ways to make money without intellectual property.
Why doesn't the IP/patents of the industrialized world matter to poorer nations? The answer in one word: jurisdiction. A U.S. patent won't stop anyone from practicing or importing an invention in any other country, so long as those activities are done entirely outside of the U.S. (Replace "U.S" with any other country or region and you have the same thing.) The article just touched on the possibility that technology might be stopped in the developing world IF it was not possible to build the potentially-infringing products to be installed elsewhere. But that really isn't much of an impediment: all products are assemblages of their component parts, and those component parts are rarely protected in their totality under patents. Want to build the technology in Nigeria (where there are no patents to it)? Then build the component parts in the industrialized world, ship them there, and let the Nigerian workers turn their wrenches. Unless there is a component part that is (1) essential to a patented product or method, (2) must be exclusively manufactured in the places where it is patented, and (3) has no non-infringing uses, then this theoretical IP won't stop the technology from being built and developed in the third world. It's a big red herring.
The problem isn't one of IP: it's one of a lack of capital and ROI. When large companies see profit in building energy infrastructure in those poorer nations, I assure you that they'll be right there.
In other words, fail.
Better luck next time.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"in many developing countries, there is strong suspicion that the TRIPS Agreement is a component of a policy of technological protectionism intended at consolidating an international division of labor where the industrialized nations generate innovations and developing countries are the market for the resulting products ."
The Global Politics of Intellectual Property Rights and Pharmaceutical Drug Policies in Developing Countries
TFS tells about "global intellectual property rights regime", which is a nonsense: there is no international patents, as a patent is only granted within a national juridiction (EU is the exception). And even huge corporations do not fill in 180 countries, they do it only where they intend to make money.
Ugo Bardi at his Resource Crisis blog has a commentary on peak oil and the exploitation of unconventional sources. Bardi has done a number of posts lately on what he calls the Seneca Cliff. The name comes from a quote from the Roman Seneca:
"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91
It's all pretty interesting and indicates our civilization is in for a hard fall in the not too distant future. It makes me glad I'm over 60 years old and probably won't have to face the worst of it.
Yes, I am lazy. But you, clearly, are not. So many prompt responses, so much text typed...
And yet, the simple request for links remains unfulfilled. One must conclude, there aren't any.
Something like "By year XXXX average temperature in region X will be N". Or "... sea-levels will rise N centimeters". Or "In Y years New York City will stop experiencing snowfalls".
And nevertheless, you responded, what, thrice already?.. Would you like to subscribe to my newsletter?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Anybody attempting to make a retort here, is politely requested to cite (include links to) at least two past global-warming predictions, that have actually materialized...
Well, two obvious ones are that sea level continues to rise and glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt.
Maybe you should be specific about what predictions you think haven't materialized. I'm guessing you either missed out on the time scales attached to those predictions or you're thinking of some twisted version of a prediction that was taken out of context. That said there are occasional poor statements by scientists but they aren't enough to overturn the vast majority of well considered statements.
They're sovereign nations and can defined their own laws.
All they need to do is change their own laws to benefit their own country.
What we really need to do is sit down and talk about whether we merely need to stop abuses of the patent system, or need to scrap it altogether and in the meantime do what we can to stop the most egregous abuses of the system.
I disagree. Historically, our patent system worked very well. The vast majority of patent abuse and trolling has been relatively recent, and in fact was nowhere near this level 20 years ago. The problems have gone hand-in-hand with the recent crony capitalism and government revolving doors. That is, I suspect they share the same root causes.
When something works pretty much fine for 200 years, then doesn't work good for 20 years, it isn't very helpful to ask what's wrong with the system that worked RIGHT for all that time. Rather, the thing to do is ask what went WRONG in recent years.
Hint: it wasn't "the system". The system is pretty much the same as it has always been.
When I think of invention or innovation anymore, I liken it to life on the Serengeti. Only a few watering holes remain and all the predators are lying in wait for anyone who dares get too close.
Besides, patents, copyrights, Intellectual Property, etc. are all first world ( read that RICH ) problems.
Does anyone think for a moment that a developing nation gives two sh*ts about patents, IP or what the laws are in ~195 other countries around the globe ? ( Hint: The answer is no. )
Sea level rise.
Antarctic ice sheet mass balance.
Greenland ice sheet mass balance. (PDF)
World wide glacier facts and figures.
Unless you're willing to specifically name something they got wrong how can I evaluate your claim that the predictions haven't materialized?
So all the wars they taught us about didn't happen? And that slavery thing was part of the system too. No the system did not work "just about fine" for 200 years. Sorry, but attempting to look at the patent system in isolation doesn't work. But even there, I am reminded of the situation between Elisha Grey and Alexander Graham Bell. Elisha Grey couldn't file a patent on a similar system because Bell got there a little bit earlier. Perhaps neither of them should have gotten the patent because if two people could independently come up with a similar idea, one might think it would be obvious. Someone in another thread said that the Wright brothers tied up aviation advances for years with their patent. How long did the Roman empire exist for? Do you want to go back to that, too?
... that the current economic system is not providing the most efficient distribution of goods and services for the benefit of all?
That is all.
There is oil shale, and deep water drilling. BP should have listened to the engineering firm about the stress cracks, and never have been allowed to use 'toxic soap' to disperse the oil, so that no one would see the slick. It would have been much better to allow the slick to form, and then recover it with the 'plastic rope' method or the like.
Peak oil is flawed, because it ignores all of the additional recovery methods available, that weren't economic to begin with. Cost for oil will go up anyway due to inflation.
I don't like fracking, except in the BSG sense, as both of them cause earthquakes.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Ah, I see. You want me to do all the work while you sit there waving your hands claiming it's all wrong. It's easy to sit back and pick nits. Maybe I'll have some time tonight to dig in to it.
Done what? Where are the pairs of links I keep asking for?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sorry, I could not read such a long post — certainly not from a coward, who keeps calling me names. But I did scan it for links and found only one — so, despite multiple attempts, you keep failing to come up with even a single pair of links (one link to a prediction, the other — to its materialization).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It is acceptable for me, because I make no claims (such as that climate science is "settled").
Those making claims bear the burden of proof. The burden, which is, obviously, too hard for you. Fail.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And that claim needs the same substantiation. In fact, for the purposes of this discussion, this claim you just made and the claim that "science is settled" are one and the same.
Nope. The defense does not need to prove innocence. Prosecution must prove guilt. You (and the IPCC) want us to dramatically change our way of life — for that, you must prove, it is necessary.
You've posted your theory (twice). If the theory were valid, it should've been able — in the decades since it was first put forth — to make numerous verifiable predictions.
If it made any, you would've posted a couple of them by now — clearly, you aren't a lazy type. As things stand, you are full of, ahem, methane... Mind your excretions.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ok, here a Real Climate post on Sea Level in the 5th IPCC Report. Figure 3a compares model projections of sea level rise to observations and since the 1950s the observations have been consistently above the mode projections. At the bottom of the post are references to the scientific papers the information was gleaned from. In each IPCC report since the second the sea level predictions have been higher than in the previous report and yet observations continue to be higher still. I guess you may classify those as failed predictions but they failed because it's worse than we predicted, not better.
It always surprises me how people can be so unskeptical of an article like your New American article. The AC did a decent job of addressing it but I'll comment on a couple of the points.
Regarding the global cooling predicted in the 1970's between 1965 and 1979 there were 7 published papers predicting global cooling and 42 predicting global warming. Global warming wins 6:1.
The Himalayan Glaciers melting by 2035 was a failure of proof reading by the relevant experts. The error was in the WG II report and if you look in the WG I report where the real science is laid out you would see nothing to support that.
As to Antarctic ice, yes the sea ice has grown (but not as much as Arctic sea ice has fallen) but the ice sheet, the ice sitting on the Antarctic continent lost and average of 70 Gt/year from 1992 to 2011.
Enough for now.
Citations? Didn't think so...
You responded to a request for two or more pairs of links with exactly one and call that "enough"? Sorry, no. Fail.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Like I said why should I do your work for you? The citations are the IPCC reports. They're available online. Look it up yourself.
Because you chose to respond to my challenge.
My challenge stands. Three people chose to respond (you and two ACs) — and none of you could complete, what all of you claim to be not only possible, but easy.
By this time some doubts should be (better be!) rising in your head, by the way: "Just why is it, that this jerk's taunting challenge is so hard?" Why aren't there — decades after Global Warming predictions began being made — any sad and sober told-ya-sos readily findable with Google?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ok, here's another Real Climate post on comparisons between model projections and observations. In particular I direct your attention to this graph of Arctic sea ice models vs. observations.
I don't know, if you sincerely don't understand my request, or are trying to weasel out without losing face (too much).
Here it is again: please, post pairs of links. The first link in each pair shall point to a quantifiable prediction, the second — to its materialization within 80% of the predicted quantity.
That chart references some predictions without links. The dramatic bold red line on it begins in 1950 — is that, when the first predictions were made? Where are they, can I read them?
But, Ok, let's stipulate the prediction really was made. Was it a scientific one — based on a decent scientific theory, or is it one of those "stalled clock" sort of thing, that happens to be correct twice a day? Two questions arise:
So, after much back-and-forth, you were able to, sort of, cite one very questionable observation (that disappeared since then as the ice returned on both poles since 2012), that may or may not have been predicted... And you want the world to change its way of life based on that?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
God you need a lot of hand holding don't you?
The legend in the sea ice graph refers to the studies they come from. For instance "GISS AOM" refers to the GISS Fast Atmosphere Ocean model. The predictions cover from 1900 to 2100 and the bold red line is what the actual observations show. They start in 1950 presumable because observations before then are too spotty to be very useful in this context. The bold black line is the ensemble mean of the different predictions. The chart is only about Arctic sea ice, nothing to do with Antarctic sea ice. There has been plenty of stuff written about the rise in Antarctic sea ice. I suggest you seek it out.
I'm tired of banging my head against your wall and you could obviously keep stringing me along forever. As the future unfolds you will find out if the scientists are generally right about this as I believe they are. The problem is that the changes from AGW are subtle from year to year and seldom do something that slaps you in the face. That makes it easy for someone like you to continue to pick nits but it doesn't change the underlying reality. Good luck.
All I asked for was two (at least) pairs of links. As in:
And you could not do it...
That's the thing! We are living in the future of the people, who were debating these very things 10-20-30-40 years ago. Their future has already unfolded and what do we see? None of the predictions made back then have materialized — at least, nothing convincing, that you could identify in two days of Internet-searching.
So, the alarmists of the past were wrong. Does it mean, today's alarmists are wrong too? I think, it is very likely.
There... Belief is all it is for you. Well, maybe, you should admit, that it is a faith — a religion — for you. Then the rest of us will switch to polite shrugging, rather than hurting your feelings pointing out the obvious holes in your "science"...
So subtle, one can only believe in — rather than know about — it... And not just "from year to year" — you could not find anything convincing "from decade to decade" either. "Seldom"? How about never? If the subject matter is so "subtle", that it can not be reliably measured, and if the theories put forth can not be tested, is it even still a science?
Yes, "someone like me". Sorry for being scientific about it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Oh, poor baby. You can't always get what you want.
I gave you two examples, sea level rise and Arctic sea ice with plenty of information in the posts I cited for you to dig deeper if you cared to. At this point I'm doubting you have the scientific skills to do that and to understand what was said in the papers even of you read them. Hence your desire to have it all presented to you on a silver platter.
So, the alarmists of the past were wrong.
That's quite a leap to assume they are wrong just because I, a lowly SysAdmin can't satisfy your desire for specifics. If you want to say they're wrong it's up to you to show specifically why they are wrong. That's the way it works in science.
Of course the original IPCC report only came out 25 years ago so there weren't a lot of quantified predictions before that.
I believe in science and the scientific method. You can't hurt my feeling by attempting to point out holes in the science. If they're valid then that's an advancement of science.
So I'm turning the tables on you. See if you can hurt my feelings by pointing out an obvious hole in the science of AGW and give me a shot at tearing it down. Link to prediction vs line to refutation style. And I won't accept some silly article like that New American post. You need to provide something with scientific substantiation.