Tag Archives: intellectual property rights

works entering the public domain on January 1, 2019

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I’m having some trouble with the math on this one.

We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”

So is it 70 years or 95 years, or does it depend on the type of work? Why can’t I read novels from the 1940s right now? Anyway, the excerpt above is from Open Culture, and has links to many other lists. A couple that catch my eye are one of Agatha Christie’s first novels and some short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.

new patent trading rules to boost productivity?

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Here is one proposal to boost productivity growth from a professor at Columbia – basically tighter protections on patent use coupled with more flexible arrangements to share and lease them between parties. It sounds okay, but I have a couple questions.

First, the author sees this as an antidote to “forced technology transfer” from developed to developing companies. If I understand correctly, this is when a factory in a developing country (let’s say China) agrees to manufacture for a developed country firm, but insists they share the legal rights to the technology they are manufacturing, allowing them to possibly cut the inventor/designer out in the future. I get that this benefits the developing country, possibly at some expense to the incentive to come up with further inventions in the developed country. Maybe – but I’d like to see the evidence. Perhaps when the inventor is ready to trade his or her knowledge in exchange for cheap labor and lax regulation, he or she is ready to reap some rewards on the last invention and move on to the next one. I don’t know whether my theory or the author’s theory is more correct, but I have no evidence for either one right now so if I had any hand in policy making I would want to see the evidence for both.

Second, and this is related, the author equates technology with knowledge. That might make sense in certain industries, for example drugs and chemicals. In many other industries, as much or more knowledge exists in the minds of experienced human beings than exists in a written-down form. Many forms of engineering are an example, because engineering by definition is using existing knowledge and experience to solve new problems without completely obvious solutions. If it takes decades of education/training/experience to get an individual to this point, even with the available written-down knowledge, there is not a whole lot of risk if that written-down knowledge leaks out. There is probably also very little value in patenting or otherwise protecting it, and much to be gained by making it freely available.

Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, and open science

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Wired talks about how Google Scholar is changing the academic publishing industry as open science starts to take hold, and how Microsoft Academic might be an even better search engine. There are also a lot of other emerging search engines out there, which the article goes into.

I use Google Scholar quite a bit, even though Google sort of stopped advertising it and makes you go through a couple extra clicks to get to it. I didn’t know Microsoft Academic or most of these other tools existed.

free images and videos online

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Canva has a helpful article with links to a large number of sources of free visuals – photos, videos, even Infographics. There is more than just Google Images and Youtube out there. There is even more here than it seems like at first because as you drill down some of the links are to additional lists…of lists…of…you get the idea.

the man’s intellectual property rights

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The founder of the Creative Commons license committed suicide after being threatened with 95 years in prison over a copyright violation. The article goes through some of the arguments against standard copyright.

‘Open access’ is an anodyne term for a profoundly transformative idea. Advocates argue that academic research should be made freely available to the world at the time of publication, and that access should not be contingent on an individual’s or institution’s ability to afford a subscription to a given journal or database. Academic authors do not usually write for profit; rather, their work aims to augment the common store of knowledge. What’s more, since the government often funds their research, it’s not a stretch to claim that the fruits of that research should belong to the public. So why should this material be subject to the same access restrictions as a mystery bestseller or a Hollywood film? As with many other inexplicable policies, the blame belongs to a vestigial middleman.

When a university professor finishes a research project, she typically records her results in an academic paper, which she submits for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These journals—the reputable ones, at least—operate via volunteers, with authors, editors, and peer reviewers all working for free. Nobody gets paid, or expects to get paid, except the publisher. In exchange for the publisher’s services, which include coordinating the publication and peer-review processes, formatting, and distribution, the author concedes the copyright to her article in perpetuity. It’s a simple trade: the academic publisher assumes the financial risk of preparing and distributing an esoteric work for which there’s a limited audience and in exchange retains all the profits that might come from its sale.

In commercial trade publishing, publishers realise profit by selling a book for a relatively low price to a wide audience. Since no wide audience exists for academic papers, academic publishers realise profit by selling them at high prices to the few entities who can’t do without them—libraries and scholars, mostly—which renders these papers functionally inaccessible to the casual or impoverished user.

what’s whiter than white?

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Here’s an article that is interesting for at least a couple reasons. First, the efforts of the Chinese (government? companies?) to steal the “trade secrets” of U.S. companies. For some types of knowledge, like how to program computers, a lot of the potential economic value to be captured exists inside the minds of people who have gained skills only through years of painful education and experience. Stealing a computer program written by one of these people doesn’t really steal that much of the value, because in order to reverse-engineer and use it you basically need someone just as knowledgeable and skilled as the person who created it in the first place. On the other hand, with a substance or material that has a “recipe”, like a chemical or drug, stealing the recipe does mean you have stolen most of the value. So you can understand why companies that develop substances and chemicals go to great lengths to protect their “intellectual property”. I still think there is a legitimate question though whether it is morally wrong to steal something like this. Developing countries can improve the lives of their people by quickly “catching up” to countries with more advanced technology. Is this wrong? Should they have to buy the knowledge? You can argue that if there are no protections for knowledge, there is less incentive for firms to take the risk of looking for new knowledge, and therefore progress will be held back. But I would ask whether if a country like China did not “steal” the knowledge, would it otherwise buy it or would it just go without. If it is the latter nobody benefits – neither the companies with the knowledge or the people that could benefit from it.

The second reason I find this interesting is that it is an example of an incredibly advanced industrial technology that really has no practical purpose, and yet seems to have immense economic value anyway. The value we place on useless and even harmful things could be a practical measure of our flaws as a species. I was shocked to hear that the filling of Oreos contains titanium dioxide just to make it appear more brilliant white. And whether the product is safe or not, the process involves toxic chemicals that have to be manufactured and trucked or trained around at some risk to the public. I really don’t think I want to be eating that. When a product is useful and there is no readily available substitute, you can justify taking some risk to bring it to market. When it is not useful, there is no risk justified in my opinion. Long-term we should be looking for 100% safe alternatives to toxic chemicals.

There’s white, and then there’s the immaculate ultrawhite behind the French doors of a new GE Café Series refrigerator. There’s white, and then there’s the luminous-from-every-angle white hood of a 50th anniversary Ford Mustang GT. There’s white, and then there’s the how-white-my-shirts-can-be white that’s used to brighten myriad products, from the pages of new Bibles to the hulls of superyachts to the snowy filling inside Oreo cookies…

The basics are public knowledge. First, the ore is fed into a large ceramic-lined vessel—the chlorinator. There it’s mixed with coke (pure carbon) and chlorine and heated to at least 1,800F. “The material inside here resembles lava. This is like running a big volcano,” Daniel Dayton, a former top executive at DuPont, told jurors about the chlorinator in 2014. (Chemours and DuPont declined to comment for this story.)

Hot gas in the chlorinator gets piped out and condensed into a new compound called titanium tetrachloride, or “tickle,” as engineers call it. The tickle is heated again, subjected to various purifying chemical reactions, and cooled. Now a yellowish liquid, the tickle is inserted into a second vessel, called the oxidizer. It’s again heated to very high temperatures and mixed with oxygen; the reaction knocks the chlorine molecule off the titanium, and two oxygen molecules attach to the titanium in its place. The resulting particles are so fine that the white stuff has the consistency of talcum powder.

 

William Lazonick vs. Wally

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Still thinking about my William Lazonick post from yesterday. One of his arguments is that it is not just stockholders that deserve a part of corporate returns, because they are not the only ones taking risk. As he explains in his working paper, taxpayers and employees also take risk:

Then I show how and why MSV [maximizing shareholder value] is a theory of value extraction that, when applied to corporate resource allocation in the United States, has undermined the social conditions of innovative enterprise and resulted in employment instability and income inequity. I refute the fundamental economic assumption of MSV that of all participants in the business corporation it is only shareholders who bear risk and hence have a claim on profits if and when they occur. Taxpayers in funding government spending on productive resources that are essential to the innovation process and workers in supplying effort to the processes of organizational learning that are the essence of innovation make productive contributions to the enterprise without guaranteed returns. Indeed I argue that public shareholders do not in general invest in the innovation process but just extract value from it, and hence bear little, if any, risk of the failure of that process. I summarize a growing body of empirical research that shows that since the 1980s, backed by MSV ideology, financial interests, including top corporate executives, have been able to extract vast amounts of value from US industrial corporations in excess of value that they may have helped to create.

I contacted Future Yada Yada workplace effort correspondent Wally from Dilbert, who offered the following. (sorry, you have to click – I’m a huge Scott Adams fan but I don’t see an easy, unambiguously 100% legal way to embed his graphic here)

please remind me, what are patents for again?

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Okay, maybe so-called intellectual property rights encourage innovation in some industries sometimes. But the evidence shows that they sometimes do the exact opposite, especially if taken to the extreme. This is the abstract of a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to control for endogeneity of patent invalidation. Patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent increase in citations to the focal patent, on average, but the impact is heterogeneous and depends on characteristics of the bargaining environment. Patent rights block downstream innovation in computers, electronics and medical instruments, but not in drugs, chemicals or mechanical technologies. Moreover, the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers more follow-on innovation by small firms.