January 28, 2004

Intellectual Property and Cargo Shipping

Posted by shonk at 11:34 AM in Economics | TrackBack

I don’t mean to flog what for most of you is probably already a dead horse, but I just wanted to point out this Wired article comparing the prevailing attitude among the big IP industries to that which basically destroyed the the US cargo shipping fleet in the 1970s. Be sure to read the whole article, but here are the concluding two paragraphs:

There’s still time to avoid the shipping industry’s fate: American IP owners can stop demanding maximum and extreme protections. The US Patent and Trademark Office can stop taking a head-in-the-sand approach - last summer it strong-armed the World Intellectual Property Organization into canceling a discussion on open source projects - and instead use the WIPO to forge a global policy that works for all nations.

By taking a flexible approach to IP, companies could capitalize on the next wave of innovation rather than shirk from it. But wait too long and this ship will have sailed.

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January 28, 2004 05:38 PM
Whither IP?
Excerpt: Thanks to shonk for alerting me to this article in Wired magazine, which compares the state of modern American IP law to the state of the American shipping industry in the late 1960s, which is not a strange as it...