Dr. James Chan checks in with an article highlighting Linux Red Hat founder's views on intellectual property rights...
An associate was recently asked to knock-off an American product here in USA for a Chinese importer. This is new, having a USA product knocked-off in USA for the China market. In this way the Chinese importer would have all of the documentation required to prove the item came from USA, and therefore, not a Chinese knock-off. Subtle.
China today is like USA was when it became great: there simply is not enough law enforcement to effect compliance with copyrights, trademarks and patents. By wildly violating those laws, American became a great nation. So is China today.
Back to trademarks... with the internet, we now can trace products back to the source. Trademarks are meant to tell the buyer the article in question is genuine. Of course, a trademark alone on a package can do no such thing... but tracebility can, and if your product is traceable, a trademark is pointless.
Let's review...
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
Intellectual property is simply an opinion, Whitehurst asserts. It's a policy that we use to try to maximize innovation. But because it's merely policy—government policy—and not some objective truth implanted on our brains by the cosmos, there's no reason to think that other governments won't disagree with the US approach. For example, in India software is not patentable. Different governments provide different opinions on what IP means.Now that is a pithy restatement of what Patry says... although I think Patry would not give it the status of even opinion...
An associate was recently asked to knock-off an American product here in USA for a Chinese importer. This is new, having a USA product knocked-off in USA for the China market. In this way the Chinese importer would have all of the documentation required to prove the item came from USA, and therefore, not a Chinese knock-off. Subtle.
China today is like USA was when it became great: there simply is not enough law enforcement to effect compliance with copyrights, trademarks and patents. By wildly violating those laws, American became a great nation. So is China today.
Back to trademarks... with the internet, we now can trace products back to the source. Trademarks are meant to tell the buyer the article in question is genuine. Of course, a trademark alone on a package can do no such thing... but tracebility can, and if your product is traceable, a trademark is pointless.
Let's review...
Patents - GMO foods
Copyrights (can't copyright recipe), written, sound or visual works.
Trademarks vs. Trade Secrets. KFC & Coca Cola are trademarked, but, their formulas are secret.
Trademarks are country specific, so you must trademark your product in every country. But if the end user can whip out his phone and trace the item in question back to your company, then traceability trumps trademarks.
There are many ways to effect traceability, holograms, serial numbers, rfid, and secret means... but either way, it is easy. Not all consumers need to be able to trace... only a few who can will warn all others when they discover a retailer perpetrating fraud.
Traceability will be the death knell for Trademarks... one-third of "intellectual propoerty rights" is going down. Yay!
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
2 comments:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/your-money/taking-an-invention-from-idea-to-the-store-shelf.html
Patents can be expensive for an entrepreneur.
From the above cited NYTimes article:
"Finally, she took matters in her own hands, hired a patent agent recommended by a friend and paid $250,000 to patent her product in the United States and 51 other countries."
Yikes!
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