Proceedings of the Workshop on Promoting Access to Scientific and Technical Data for the Public Interest An Assessment of Policy Options (1999) / Chapter Skim
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4 Economic Forces in the Production, Dissemination, and Use of Scientific and Technical Databases
4 Economic Forces in the Production, Dissemination, and Use of Scientific and Technical Databases
Pages 101-110
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From page 101... ...
Let's go on to the origins of intellectual property protections. ~ think it is helpful to understand how intellectual property protection came about and what the different models were long, long ago.
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From page 102... ...
The efficient usage price of a good or service is its marginal cost, which is zero, or at least close to zero, for some databases and other forms of intellectual property. There is a trade-off between setting efficient usage prices and setting prices that provide incentives to create the good or service in the first place.
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From page 103... ...
Additionally, exacerbating the situation, are the frequent, independent paper patent inventors, who generate hundreds of patent filings without ever designing or manufacturing a product, while abusing patent office rules, to tailor their current claims against modern products based on the specification filed decades ago. Thus, the intellectual property protection and reward system as it currently exists appears both inappropriate and inhibiting to innovation in the microelectronics industry.
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From page 104... ...
If you use these percentages to rank these protection mechanisms, "patents" ranks, in both product and process innovations, six out of eight, that is, five mechanisms are more important, those five being secrecy, lead time, complementary sales and services, complementary manufacturing, and complexity. The only mechanisms that "patents" beats on this list are "other legal" and "other." So, they're evidently not very important.
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From page 105... ...
U.S. courts have been extremely reluctant to hold that a unilateral refusal to license intellectual property can be antitrust violation..
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From page 106... ...
Trade secret does not prevent independent creation. The third aspect of an intellectual property protection regime is the height, which means,
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From page 107... ...
There is evidence that strong intellectual property rights and other forms of legal assistance have not been critical to innovation in most industries, although certainly patent protection is important in some markets,
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From page 108... ...
Another specific recommendation is the proposal to have a registry for databases, so at least you know what is protected. More work needs to be done to study the effects of stronger versus weaker intellectual property protection.
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From page 109... ...
One case that ~ think is particularly instructive is West Publishing, which had a copyright and produced a compilation of law documents in a particular format, called the Star Pagination format. Even though the database from which the legal opinions came eventually became widely available through electronic distribution, the Star Pagination system had become a sort of library standard used by the legal system.
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From page 110... ...
Number two, with regard to the appropriate regime, whether it should be a liability regime along the line of trade secrets, ~ really haven't thought a lot about that. ~ would merely say that ~ know a comment was made earlier about a database protection regime along the lines of unfair competition and trademark.
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