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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: etchmeister who wrote (24805)	12/17/2010 9:43:47 AM
From: Sun Tzu	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

Re IP Rights and Laws You are carrying an intelligent debate and there is nothing there for me to take offense at. It is just that when it comes to IP, people have drastically different views depending on which side of the fence they fall on. And this has nothing to do with their nationality. If you followed the fight regarding HD DVD vs Blue Ray (or if you are old enough to remember, Betamax vs VHS and/or various video disk/cd wars) then you see that the underlying battle cry was the needs of content producers vs the needs of equipment producers and consumers. So even in countries where IP rights have long established roots, the issue is not so clear cut, let alone in developing nations. There are areas that we can all agree on: nobody should be allowed to market a knock off as an original. And products must comply within the legal jurisdiction in which they are sold (which is why Samsung pays royalty to Rambus for the memories they sell in US and Europe...something that I disagree with, but for different reasons than we are discussing). Beyond this, everything else is up for grabs. For example, there are people in Africa and Asia who are dying for horrible diseases that are well preventable and curable. But these people cannot afford to pay the western drug companies. If a drug company in one of these nations clones the drugs in question and sell it cheap to their public, they have not caused any revenue shortfall to the original drug producers and they have saved many lives. The question then becomes should they be allowed to do so and save lives, or should we let people die in agony by suing such drug makers? This is not even as much a moral question as you may think. Much of modern medicine is based on herbal medicine and folk remedies in developing nations. We use that knowledge and then rewrite the rules so that they cannot benefit from our knowledge. Which is why India has started registering and protecting Ayurvedic medicine. But other nations have not done so or have lost much of their IP to what would amount to "theft" in the west. And again, there is a lot of historical precedence that shows every country that today is complaining about IP theft has blatantly engaged in it in the past when it suited their needs. Go back a couple of centuries and read about how England was complaining about blatant copyright breaches by US. Go even further back and see how Umayyad monarchs in Spain were forbidding sale of scientific books to Europeans because the books were being plagiarized (side note: Copernicus would be expelled from scientific community today for near verbatim pulverization of his most celebrated work from a middle eastern manuscript!). The bottom line is that we make our laws to benefit our society and others make their laws to the benefit of theirs. We can apply our laws within their jurisdiction, but we have no right to expect others to comply with our laws. ST