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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (16900)	4/12/2007 6:24:10 PM
From: 8bits	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217852

ipr aggression ... its ok ... follow the leader ... for it is all an emergency ... to provide work, to maintain social stability, to feed the people, etc etc, just ask around and query the spin doctors at Washington Post, and then People's Daily. What is the difference, except a matter of degree? Pretty sure most Western nations (definitely Canada and Australia )with national health plans "negotiate" with US pharmaceutical companies to get lower prices on all drugs not just ones deemed to be part of national security or public health issues. If Germany demands this of US pharmaceuticals I see this as quid pro quo. A few anomalies in the system (such as treatment of agricultural subsidies by most Western nations..) do not mean we dispense entirely with free trade... the same applies to IPR.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (16900)	4/13/2007 3:40:54 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217852

Making it illegal to think for oneself and come up independently with an idea which is previously "owned" by somebody is absurd. It is simply a matter of power. But power is what we have to deal with. Unfortunately, if people make efforts for which they are not paid, they won't bother with such effots, unless they are so far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs that they have reached the ideal state for humans of doing what they think is a good idea. It's a luxury few of us reach. But fortunately for me, I long ago reached that stage. There will be more and more people reaching that happy state of human evolution and there are free efforts put into many things, such as Firefox, Debian, malaria killing [$ill Gates, Warren Buffett donations funding that among other things]. Inventors like inventing. I always wanted to be an inventor and that was long before I realized there was a buck in it. But for many years, mostly I just earned a living doing banal, prosaic work in the belly of the beast, with some inventing here and there as I ended up, not so strangely, involved with the R&D side of BP. People need groceries and houses. That includes inventors. If they don't get cash flow from their inventions, they have to earn money as waiters or something, instead of inventing. It is quite simple to see that inventors having a LOT of incentive and cash flow to invent is a good thing, unless one is Ted Kaczynski, or a,general purpose Luddite. Governments have tried to make patent protection rewarding enough to ensure umpty $billion floods into inventing. They don't want some lucky geek to hold the world to hostage for what might be a fairly obvious solution to a vast problem. For example, a geek might stumble upon a telomere auto-copy gene which they can turn off with some other gene which is missing in people prone to cancer. If they could patent the insertion of the gene, they could demand all the money that people with cancer have, or a significant proportion of it. I could understand an impecunious father whose offspring is dying from telomeres gone wrong, simply breaking the law and using the good gene from his own body to save the child from dying and to give it a full and happy life. He shouldn't just invent CDMA and give his child a royalty-free cyberphone. One is understandable, the other is very bad for my bank balance and will stop QUALCOMM inventing more technology, such as a telomere-stopper, which is on my to-do list. He shouldn't steal my money BEFORE I have have invented the telomere-stopper as he won't be able to steal, aka copy, my invention if I haven't invented it. Mqurice