Re: [Patents] Greenspan on property

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> Market Economies and Rule of Law
> http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/speeches/2003/20030404/default.htm
> April 4, 2003
>
> Greenspan is unfortunatelly talking about "ownership of ideas" instead
> of "ownership of implementations of ideas":

I don't see any advantage in the latter wording.

A better alternative to "ideas" would be

        intellectual creations

You have to be careful with words-to-avoid.html, a favorite game of
Richard Stallman.  This easily degenerates into a game of political
correctness which makes it impossible to communicate, because there will
always be something incorrect, whatever expression you chose.

If you say "ownership of implementations of ideas", this could mean that
the whole spectrum of relevant implementations and thereby really the idea
itself is owned.  It would work great a Patent Newspeak: another
double-edged way of expressing things and confusing decisionmakers.

Also, an implementation (creation) can also be construed as a single very
specific idea.  So "ownership of ideas" still seems appropriate for
Greenspan's context.

> But he poses some good questions that we hopefully will get some good
> answers to:

Indeed a good question, worth quoting.

> "If our objective is to maximize economic growth, are we striking the
> right balance in our protection of intellectual property rights? Are the
> protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so broad
> as to shut down follow-on innovation? Are such protections so vague that
> they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of
> capital? How appropriate is our current system--developed for a world in
> which physical assets predominated--for an economy in which value
> increasingly is embodied in ideas rather than tangible capital?"

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
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