Re: [Patents] Greenspan on property

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> 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?"

If there's something wrong with this question then perhaps the underlying
assumption that market economy (exchange of private values) as known from
the material world must be transferred to the immaterial world and that
some kind of property system must be created in order to fit the
immaterial into the procrustean bed of an economic order based on the
material.

Fortunately we do not really need to bring this possibility into the
discussion in order to refute the patent nonsense.  Otherwise we'd
probably be branded as 'communists' very quickly.  So for the current
context Greenspan's question is sufficient.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
140,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/