GregNews blasts Recital 11

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

You may remember Arlene McCarthy's amended Recital 11 which was carried by
JURI, the Plenary and now the Council Working Paper which you find in the
top news at

        http://swpat.ffii.org/

Recital 11

 The competitive position of European industry in relation to its major
 trading partners will be improved if the current differences in the legal
 protection of computer-implemented inventions are eliminated and the 
 legal situation is transparent. With the present trend for traditional
 manufacturing industry to shift their operations to low-cost economies
 outside the European Union, the importance of intellectual property
 protection and in particular patent protection is self-evident.

The first of these sentences was in the CEC proposal, the second was added
by McCarthy.  The logical connection between the two is very weak and the
claims inherent in the latter are very far from self-evident, as we have
pointed out in 

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/juri0304/
        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/plen0309/

GregNews has some nice quotations and strong words on US variants of
McCarthy's self-evidences.  

--------------
!20040217  Future inventions will happen globally - no US pre-eminence

There is a ton of discussion about the threat of free trade to American
middle-class "thinking" jobs, or as Robert Reich nicely puts its,
"symbolic analytic" work (indeed, this week Siemens announced it will
move 15,000 programming jobs from US and Europe to India and China and
Eastern Europe).  A lot of people who don't understand technology
(executive branch, Congress, the Federal Reserve, too many academics)
put forth the following salvations to these middle class woes:

        "What is at stake here is our ability to be pre-eminent in
        the world of ideas."  -  Senator Joe Lieberman

        "People don't understand what a great opportunity offshoring
        is for US companies.  Apart from high savings, it allows US
        companies to concentrate on their core competencies and the
        people (in the US) can move on to higher paying, more creative,
        more value generating jobs." - Dan Griswold, Cato Institute

        If India has a comparative advantage in radiology and the
        services of radiologists can be transferred over Internet or
        fiber optics, fewer radiologists would be employed in the US
        but American health care services will become cheaper and
        doctors will specialize in other skills. - President's
        Council of Economic Advisers, Feb. 2004

        We must focus on developing next generation industries and
        next generation talent - in fields like biotechnology,
        nanotechnology and digital media distribution; around issues
        like IT security, mobility and manageability - that will
        create long-term growth and jobs here at home, while
        raising all of our living standards in the process.  Carly
        Fiorina - CEO HP - Wall Street Journal, 13 Feb 2004

        "We tend to keep the high end of the value chain.  We are
        outsourcing the more standardized part of high tech." -
        Janet Yellen, economist UCal Berkeley - head of CEA for Clinton


That is, with this American idea pre-eminence, new value generating jobs
can be created at new companies formed in America with new ideas (protected
by patents, otherwise the jobs definitely go overseas) or new diseases to
treat.  These mantras, repeated by way too many other people, sounds nice
and reassuring, and are equivalent to:

        "Americans will always be higher on the technology ladder
        than foreigners."

As someone who has spent the last fifteen years reading patents, journal
articles and conference papers from around the world, let me say this:
the above thinking is wrong, pathetic and racist - a lie.  There is no more
pre-eminence in the world of ideas (especially given the problems with the
US educational system).  And any American basing US economic and social
policy on such a belief is hurting America.  In not spending much time
reading about technology developments around the world, these people are
incompetent.  Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, states it
nicely about these false beliefs:

        "The United States has long drawn comfort from the quality
        differential of its education system.  However, in the
        Internet Age with its ubiquitous diffusion of knowledge,
        innovation and technological change, that may turn out to
        be an increasingly false sense of security."

Efforts like open source software and the Semantic Web (one of the most
anti-middle class activities to date) are great for the world, but lesser
so for America and Europe, in their facilitating this diffusion.

At the end of this PATNEWS are abstracts of science projects from Asia,
and then US patents issued to Chinese companies - all top of the ladder
stuff.

[...]

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
300,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/