As I watch Connections, Burke explicitly repeats a point over and over: a famous inventor or some such was one of maybe dozens of people who contributed to a success, contemporaneously and historically. Yes, Edison tried 6000 filaments for light bulbs before getting the one he settled on... but the blown glass, the vacuum, the spark, all invented by others.
I think people get it backwards; IPR led to USA inventiveness. Obviously there was worldwide inventiveness before IPR, and although we have some 7 million patents issued in USA, almost nothing traded commercially is patented. USA inventiveness seems to have more to do with the explosion of commerce than IPR law. And can we trace the rate of inventiveness? Are we introducing pathbreaking new technologies at and ever greater rate?
I think people get it backwards; IPR led to USA inventiveness. Obviously there was worldwide inventiveness before IPR, and although we have some 7 million patents issued in USA, almost nothing traded commercially is patented. USA inventiveness seems to have more to do with the explosion of commerce than IPR law. And can we trace the rate of inventiveness? Are we introducing pathbreaking new technologies at and ever greater rate?
Intellectual property rights allows one who commercializes a product to shut out all of the competition, regardless of how much those shut out may have in fact contributed.
As a practical mater, almost none of the nearly 7 million patents issued in usa have ever turned into a product, but the fact is the valuable ones , the commercial ones, use govt to block the ever improving market process to the benefit of a patent holder.
0 comments:
Post a Comment