Strict International Patent Laws Hurt Developing Countries, an article in YaleGlobal from 2002 by Amy Kapczynski:
In 1998, 39 pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against South Africa. They hoped to stop the government from producing the generic drugs that would have made treatment affordable for the country’s AIDS victims. A public outcry ensued, and critics accused pharmaceutical companies of valuing profit over human life. Although these same companies were eventually pressured into dropping the lawsuit, the conflict illustrates a problem inherent in recent free trade agreements – inflexible patent regulations can prevent developing countries from obtaining or producing affordable versions of the medicine they need.
Understanding the lawsuit requires a bit of background. Patents are temporary monopolies granted by governments. They give the inventor a right to exclude everyone else from producing, selling, or distributing a product in that country. Monopolies are generally viewed as a bad thing, because they create what economists call “deadweight losses.” So why are governments granting them? The theory is that the higher prices that patents allow companies to charge provide incentives to develop and commercialize new products. The dirty secret about patents, as a law school professor of mine once put it, is that no one knows how strong patents have to be to serve this purpose. For example, are twenty years of patent protection necessary to provide sufficient incentives for research? Or is ten years sufficient? Under international rules, patents must now be granted for a minimum of twenty years – although until recently, patents were often much shorter, even in the U.S.
Here is another dirty secret: Patents cannot generate innovation where there is no market.
Faced with a potential public health crisis [during the anthrax crisis], Congress recognized what many other countries have been arguing all along: that patents are not “rights” but rather privileges – and that they do not come before the rights to health and life.
How might this kind of logic apply to patents (or other forms of IP) outside of the medical context? And what would be a rationale approach to resolving it?
Image via Wikipedia
The Patent Lottery: Exploiting Behavioral Economics for the Common Good by Dennis Crouch
Lotteries are immensely popular. Players are willing to give the organizer a large monetary cut of every ticket purchase in return for a chance at a jackpot. In some ways, our current patent system operates as a lottery as well. Most [...]
Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): Do Patents Stimulate R&D Investment and Promote Growth?:
As background material, this post reviews the sizable body of empirical research analyzing the impact of patents on R&D investment and economic growth. Three future posts will present new empirical research featured in our book Patent Failure. The theme across all four posts is [...]
Image via Wikipedia
From the “keeping up with technology” department comes this: Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud – ReadWriteWeb:
Dave Winer yesterday announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon’s EC2. His how-to is so easy to understand that we had our own server up and [...]
Against Intellectual Monopoly, a book by by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, two economists who have proposed abolishing copyrights and patents:
It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, [...]
Economists: Abolish Copyright & Patents to Save the Economy:
Two economists from Washington University have looked at current copyright and patent laws and concluded that they’re not good. The pair see current intellectual property laws as similar to “medieval trade monopolies” which were bad for the economy as a whole, and are calling for the system [...]
Image via Wikipedia
The Volokh Conspiracy – Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet: A General Approach:
This article offers a general framework for applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will seek a technology-neutral translation of Fourth Amendment principles from physical space to cyberspace, and it considers what new distinctions in the [...]
The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog: Beyond Economic Analysis of Intellectual Property: The Need For Social and Cultural Theory (Madhavi Sunder):
Over the course of the last century intellectual property has grown exponentially, but its march into all corners of our lives and to the most destitute corners of the world has paradoxically exposed [...]
Image via Wikipedia
That Was the Copyright Year That Was by Bruce E. Boyden of Marquette University Law School:
I recently compiled a list of the biggest developments in copyright law in 2008, based on a not very systematic survey. I thought it would be worth sharing here, as I know that I often wish for lists [...]
Image via Wikipedia
Law Librarians, Schools Propose Bold Move to Digital, Open Access Alternative – Library Journal
In a broad call to action, a group of the nations’ law schools and law librarians have signed the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. In essence, the statement urges law schools to adopt digital communication, forgo print, [...]
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Amazon retreats on Kindle’s text-to-speech issue | Digital Media – CNET News:
Apparently, Amazon won’t fight the publishing industry on the issue of whether the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech function violates copyright.
The retailer, which makes the popular Kindle electronic-book reader, announced late Friday that the company is modifying systems to allow authors [...]
Follow me on Twitter 