>>> Our country did that till Reagan. They made big companies share their trade secrets with smaller companies so those smaller companies could use them to build upon.
>Link?
Sorry, trying to keep up and doing a terrible job. But I wanted to address this one because it came up a couple times.
Not a link, but a quote from the book Cornered by Barry C. Lynn:
"In 1939, the Federal Trade Commission cited the monopoly [AT&T} for sitting on such ready-for-market innovations such as automatic dialing, office switchboards, and new handsets. In 1952, antitrust officials finally took action. But unlike the later push against AT&T that resulted in the breakup of the firm, the trustbusters of 1952 opted to leave the corporation whole if AT&T agreed to share some of its technologies with the general public. One of these ideas was called the "electronic transistor." Today we call this idea -- which AT&T gave away to thirty-five U.S. and foreign firms--the "semiconductor."
Or consider the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This corporation also started life as a government-sanctioned monopoly, huilt around a pool of patents gathered from other firms. In this case, the purpose was to master such electronic arts as radio and television, originally for national security. For a while RCA was extremely innovative. The company introduced the first color television in 1939 and pioneered the video-guided bomb during World War II. Like AT&T, however, RCA tended to sit on technologies, not least because it enjoyed such an immense advantage in the market over any potential rival...
"...In 1958 [the trustbusters] forced RCA to reveal its basic radio and television technologies--about twelve thousand patents. Among the firms that picked up some of these technologies were small, eager electronics manufacturers named Zenith, Sony, and Philips..."
"... [The trustbusters] were not Jacksonian hillbillies out to chop the beast to pieces with a broad axe; rather. they were husbandmen who were carefully trimming the giant trees that shaded the land and then sowing the needy sun-kissed soil with seed that sprouted into firms with names like Intel, Compaq, Dell, and NVIDIA."
-Z |
