Posted on 01/02/2011 12:11:23 PM PST by neverdem
As an alternative, one of the big drags on the consumer marketplace and business is patent and copyright “farming.” This means that companies who contribute nothing, make their money from the buying of patents and copyright, the sitting on them, wanting royalties from those who want to put them to good use.
Or worse, as with the immense media libraries: sitting on them, not marketing them, but not allowing anyone else to market them.
So the question should be raised: should the government grant or continue patents and copyrights that are anti-competitive, and a drag on the markets?
Comparatively speaking, the General Mining Act of 1872 was perhaps the most pro-business, pro-consumer, pro-industry law ever written.
It said that the mineral rights to land are separate from the ownership of land, and that anyone had a right to stake a mineral rights claim on any land not claimed, and could not be prevented from mining it.
Importantly, it had a “use it or lose it” clause, so that if you struck a claim, you had to either “improve” it to the tune of $500 a year, or sell its ore to the gross profit of $500 a year. If you didn’t, you lost your claim.
Of course, if you mined on someone else’s land, you had to pay negotiated, reasonable royalties. But the land owner could not stop you from mining.
Now imagine if these concepts were transferred to patent and copyright law.
You could patent or copyright your original idea or product, but to keep your government protection, you had to “use it or lose it”, and let others use it.
This is not impossible, and would cause an explosion in the marketplace, of a huge amount of content available to consumers.
It would be a huge shot in the arm to business as well.
Would you or did you buy a computer made in the USA if it cost 2X what a Lenovo or Mac costs? Don't blame the companies, blame the consumer and the government. High Tech outsourcing is done to remain competitive because that is what the market demands. The only way to change that paradigm is to reduce the cost of doing business in the US (start with the 35% corporate income tax) and impose a tariff on manufactured goods.
Witness DOE. A greater example of using subsidies to push research in wrong directions would be hard to find.
I do blame the companies.
“Free traders” would sell their own mother to Beijing, if it saved a penny on production costs.
America is at risk. This is no longer a parlor game of make-believe “Atlas Shrugged”. We are destroying our own nation.
Time is running out.
Which leads to the question: does steering the government to a less destructive path end up helping or hurting?
Free Traders only play the hand they have been dealt. They are answerable to the share holders and the prospect of losing market share and with it shareholder value will not be tolerated. Further blame the American consumer who price shops for everything. In a free market the equivalent good differentiated only by price will win out. Absent any tariff protections countries with lower labor costs, lower taxes and less regulation will beat the costs of US labor, high taxes and onerous regulations.
Given the right business environment those same "Free Traders" will kick the ass of any top down, oppressive society in the world just like they did in WWII.
And while they are at it, ban research into global warming. That will force them to focus on topics that we all agree on.
Nothing new, what we have in the Iphone etc, is new usage of existing product. Will is taking about a completely new item that will fire growth. Such as a cold fusion motor for cars. Little far fetched but it is only an example.
Let’s then change our system so that producing domestically is the most profitable choice.
That means reducing regulations and bureaucracy.
Getting lawyers out of the way.
But the quickest step to start with, is (significant) import tariffs.
Remove the incentive to outsource.
As of 2009, the dollar value of our imports, was virtually identical (within a single percentage point) to our national tax bill.
So. Let’s shift that tax expense, to somewhere which will encourage production here:
Replace our entire tax code, with one single, across the board 100% import tariff.
Jobs will begin returning to America, immediately.
Of course there will be repercussions, but there are very significant, very real and very dangerous repercussions already to America, resulting from a process more efficient in it’s destructiveness, than if an enemy Air Force carpet bombed America’s factories.
We have destroyed the greatest manufacturing capacity, in human history.
Some day we will need that manufacturing capacity.
History has not stopped.
We need to act now, and begin bringing it back.
True,
I couldn't agree more.
Most Boards of Directors are looking at the next quarter, not the next decade. Long term research and development is very expensive and slow in paying back.
I have two friends that had that happen. Filing a patent is often an invitation to either get it stolen, or get sued by some company that filed a bunch of bogus ones in the hope that someone would make it work.
IBM uses patents as negotiating chips in lawsuits or to prevent lawsuits. Corporations, depending on their sector, are usually better served by marketing strategy than patents.
That's not to say that science and technology aren't important. I think they've been the core of our country's economic engine for its entire existence and the reason we became the world's lone superpower.
George Will: Faux conservative, and friend to elitism.
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Most patents are a wasteful dead end.
I did the drawings and calcs for a friend’s patent (pro bono). He did finally get the patent after lawyering up, but never was able to sell it to anyone. What looks good to one guy is boring to the next.
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>> “The exception that proves the rule are scientifically oriented companies with a vested interest in research (e.g., pharmaceuticals).” <<
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I sure wouldn’t number Pharma with “scientifically oriented companies;” their interest is not in science, but in technology that will turn a profit, and get a drug approved, even though almost all of the drugs so approved have been proven by science to be harmful, and life shortening (recent example: Avandia, known to be harmful from the beginning, but kept on the market to the bitter end, and Viox = Ditto)
Why, then, as we take more and more of these pharmaceuticals, are we living longer and longer and longer?
If what you say is true, it should be the other way around.
Too bad that all too often foreign businesses use this law to extract billions in natural resources from the US without paying any royalties.
>> “Why, then, as we take more and more of these pharmaceuticals, are we living longer and longer and longer?” <<
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Myth!
We are not living longer as a group. We as a group still live the Biblical “three score and ten” plus presently two years.
Promoting the myth is just as evil as making the drugs.
Throughout the world, the longest living people are those that eschew all drugs and processed fake foods. They offset the rest that die in their 50s and 60s. When people from long living cultures come to the west, they quickly begin to die at earlier ages.
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