The State of Infringement
After the paranoiac nonsense of State of Fear, I’d almost forgotten that Michael Crichton has actual interest in science. Yet now (okay, a week ago), he suddenly comes out with a lucid and important critique of the dangers posed to research by an overly-permissive patent system.
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Unfortunately for the public, the Metabolite case is only one example of a much broader patent problem in this country. We grant patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise, and it’s gotten us into trouble in the past. Some years back, doctors were allowed to patent surgical procedures and sue other doctors who used their methods without paying a fee. A blizzard of lawsuits followed. This unhealthy circumstance was halted in 1996 by the American Medical Association and Congress, which decided that doctors couldn’t sue other doctors for using patented surgical procedures. But the beat goes on.
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It’s always a bit startling when someone you’ve written off as irrational comes out of left field with something that’s dead-on coherent…
Actually, it underscores the recent observation that intellectual property rights aren’t an intrinsically partisan issue:
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Intellectual property policy may not be divided along left-right political party lines, participants in a consumer-led conference [in Brussels] on the politics and ideology of intellectual property concluded.
…One of the underlying philosophical questions of the global IP debate that the conference is shedding light on is whether the debate may be divided into a left-right political issue. This is not the case, the moderator of one session concluded.
Bruce Lehman of the Washington-based Akin Gump, Strauss Hauer & Feld agreed, using the software directive as an example as it had been supported by people from the Green Party as well as conservative People’s Party.
Declan McCullagh of CNET news service said that IP policy was indeed partisan in political terms, referring to digital copyrights in the US in particular. He showed how the entertainment industry gave money to the Democrats and not the Republicans. Morever, three of four heads of associations such as the Recording Industry Association of America are Democrats (except Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol). Zuck disagreed, saying it was an issue of correlation versus causation and that Hollywood artists just tend to be Democrats.
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Rufus Pollock of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (United Kingdom) said that IP policy is not divided along political party lines, noting that when the software directive was discussed there were cross-political splits even at the national level.
Instead, he said, intellectual property may be divided into roughly two camps: the rights holders and the general public, which both benefits from new work but also bears the cost and thus is the only group that has a balanced view. The problem, according to Pollock, is that the general public is poorly organised and poorly concentrated, as opposed to industry.
