Re: A. Horns: FeeFiFoII bomardiert uns ins 19. Jahrhundert
On 27 Feb 2004, at 0:50, Hartmut Pilch wrote:
> Allerdings ist die Behauptung vom "Zurueckbomben ins 19. Jahrhundert"
> Polemik fuer den Patentanwaltstammtisch. Ausser an diesem Stammtisch
> ist sonst nirgendwo irgend jemand der Meinung, dass das Patentwesen
> unbedingt alle wichtigen Bereiche der Wirtschaft erfassen muss und
> dass Forschung im Bereich der angewandten Naturwissenschaften
> rueckwaertsgewandt und dem 19. Jahrhundert zugehoerig sei.
<http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200402272/defa
ult.htm>
[...]
If our objective is to maximize economic growth, are we striking the
right balance in our protection of intellectual property rights? Are
the protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so
broad as to shut down follow-on innovation? Are such protections so
vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and
the cost of capital? How appropriate is our current system--developed
for a world in which physical assets predominated--for an economy in
which value increasingly is embodied in ideas rather than tangible
capital? The importance of such questions is perhaps most readily
appreciated here in Silicon Valley. Rationalizing the differences
between intellectual property rights as defined and enforced in the
United States and those of our trading partners has emerged as a
seminal issue in our trade negotiations.
If the form of protection afforded to intellectual property rights
affects economic growth, it must do so by increasing the underlying
pace of output per labor hour, our measure of productivity growth.
Ideas are at the center of productivity growth. Multifactor
productivity by definition attempts to capture product innovations
and insights in the way that capital and labor are organized to
produce output. Ideas are also embodied directly in the capital that
we employ. In essence, the growth of productivity attributable to
factors other than indigenous natural resources and labor skill, is
largely a measure of the contribution of ideas to economic growth and
to our standards of living.
Understanding the interplay of ideas and economic growth should be an
area of active economic analysis, which for so many generations has
focused mainly on physical things. This work will not be easy. Even
as straightforward an issue as isolating the effect of the length of
patents on overall economic growth, a prominent issue recently before
our Supreme Court, poses obvious formidable challenges. Still, we
must begin the important work of developing a framework capable of
analyzing the growth of an economy increasingly dominated by
conceptual products.
[...]
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