Despite a potentially crippling patent injunction against selling Word that Microsoft is battling on appeal, Microsoft, via a senior lawyer, is nevertheless calling for a global patent system “to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world”. Yep–despite the big hit they just took due to i4i’s patent, Microsoft is concerned about the “unmanageable backlogs and interminable pendency periods” of national patent systems, which have 3.5 million patents pending. You heard that right–Microsoft thinks more is “needed to be done to allow corporations to protect their intellectual property.” What, do they want i4i to be able to get sextuple, instead of just triple, damages? To jail Microsoft board members?
Microsoft’s lawyer repeats the tired old bunk about patents being necessary to promote innovation, yada yada — “By facing the challenges, realizing a vision, overcoming political barriers, and removing procedural obstacles we can build a global patent system that will promote innovation, enrich public knowledge, encourage competition and drive economic growth and employment.”
Two good things about this: (a) a global system would, possibly, reduce the number of patent lawyers; and (b) I was feeling sorry for Microsoft over the Word injunction, but now don’t need to anymore.
Update: Let me add that I think this has no chance of happening. The patent lawyers in countries around the world would block it. The way the system works now, you file a patent application first in your home country, and within a year or two (depending on whether you use the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) or Paris Convention procedures), you can file corresponding patent applications in other countries or regions claiming a priority date based on your first country’s filing date. But you have to pay filing fees, sometimes translation fees (which can be astronomical), local attorney fees, and local maintenance fees in each country you want the patent to issue in. Let’s say it costs $15-20k for a patent to be filed and ultimately issued in the US. Well you might want to have the patent filed also in, say, the European Union, Japan, China, Brazil, Canada, India. So now we are up to well over $100k-200k. And that is not even global. Under a global system presumably you would file once and it would be enforceable in every country in the world party to the treaty. It might be more expensive than the current $20k for a single country but far less than cost of filing in multiple countries now. So presumably under a global system, you would file a patent infringement suit in the appropriate court, and if you win, you just take the judgment to local courts in whatever countries the defendant is competing with you and have that country’s courts enforce the judgment as a mere formality.
This would make global patents easier and cheaper to get and easier and cheaper to enforce. Presumably people would want to use European or American local patent examining offices for quality purposes, so it would tend to put out of work the patent bar in “Southern” (third world) countries. You can expect a mobilized patent bar in most countries to fight this. Such proposals have been around for decades, and never go anywhere. Thank God for protectionist lawyers!
[Mises Blog cross-post; Against Monopoly cross-post]
As Cory Doctorow put it, a computer is a machine for copying bits. If you put a cultural artifact into bits, it’s going to get copied. And anybody whose business model depends on stopping people from copying bits is f*cked, plain and simple. As horrifyingly accurate a prediction as Stallman’s “Right to Read” is of the copyfascists ideal world, I think it’s about as plausible a threat as Khrushchev’s plan to catch up with the West by 1970.
From Horwitz’s post “Mises and His (Apparent) Call for 100% Reserves” at “Coordination Problem” (formerly The Austrian Economists).
Steve,
Putting aside what Mises thought, it seems to me clear on libertarian principles that as capitalist acts between consenting adults are not aggression and are thus permissible, fractional reserve banking is fine on libertarian grounds so long as there is no fraud. Do you agree with this?
However, given the immense potential for confusion–customers are told they are “depositors” and they often think their money is “in” the bank; while most of it is lent out and thus they get interest–deposit should be distinguished from a loan. The customer should be apprised that he is receiving a credit instrument. Do you agree?
Any claims that he is “guaranteed” to be able to get his money out at any time are also problematic since a run is at least possible. So the “guarantee” language should not be used; this is especially so if the frbnotes contain a suspension clause. Do you agree?
If so, then the only dispute remaining is a purely economic one. You think frbnotes, credit instruments, can circulate as money; some Rothbardians do not (I am not sure). You think it’s possible to have a stable freebanking system that is able to arrange its affairs so as to avoid runs; some Rothbardians do not (I do not). You think the ability of freebanks to expand the supply of money in response to increased demand for money is economically useful, for “stickiness” and similar “market failure” [or so I perceive this argument] reasons; Rothbardians do not (I do not; it seems to me that there is no stickiness problem that needs a solution; and that the freebankers implicitly and fallaciously equate fiduciary money created out of thin air with wealth).
Do you agree that the economic issues in the last paragraph are the basic crux of disagreement between freebankers and 100% reservers? It seems to me that in a free society freebankers would be free to try to set this up; and we would see what happens. (Yes, I know some of you think we have historical evidence already; but the point is the libertarians ought to have no real dispute here; and the economists can either debate on apriori grounds, or on empirical ones–on the latter, one approach is to just try it and see what happens.)
By the way I gather at least some of you freebankers would prefer a 100% reserve gold standard to the current federal reserve fiat money fractional reserve system; and I know I would prefer your private freebanking fractional reserve system to the current centralized statist version of fractional reserve system.
Posted by: Stephan Kinsella | September 04, 2009 at 11:27 AM