On 18 Feb 02, Gil Robertson wrote: ---8<--- > I do not believe Demeter can claim any contribution to the > intellectual property. I do not think that RS claimed that anything he > offered was uniquely his original work. I understand that in the > "Agricultural Lectures", he was reintroducing old customs, that had > been lost through changing practises and offering some explanation as > to how they may function, as he encouraged us to innovate.
Your views tally with mine. FYI... the following is a message I sent to another list on the subject of intellectual property rights. Owen McShane is a man of many parts including international expertise on intellectual property rights. His website is http://mcshane.orcon.net.nz and below I have extracted a few of Owen's thoughts from his many messages to the NZ newsgroups on Usenet. Cheerio... Rex == Owen McShane compilation starts: Copyright is a subset of intellectual property which includes the following: Know how (the most common) Trade secrets (how the above is protected) Copyright Trade marks Service marks Registered designs Patents McShane's rule of thumb is that a patent is what you use in the short term while you build the value of your service mark. But already in this thread we are seeing that different industry sectors have different attitudes to intellectual property mechanisms. Computerland (patents are meaningless) is different to Engineering which is different to Pharmaceuticals (patents are everything). This is because of the difference in the product life cycles. ==== You do not seem to understand that the purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage innovation. It does this in two ways. First is by granting monopolies to provide a reward to those who take the early risk. But the granting of those monopolies is designed to encourage their breaking. Trademarks do last in perpetuity but the trick is to keep them out of the language because trademark (and now service mark) law has always said that you cannot trademark a word from the English language. Xerox and Hoover and Vaseline and Frig(idare) have all had to fight these battles. But what is wrong with that? Similarly patents are intended to be broken by innovators. That is the whole idea. Queen Elizabeth the First understood this. It seems to be taking a while for others to catch on. ==== It is not possible to suppress an invention in spite of popular mythology. Letters Patent mean just that - public letters which disclose the invention. Queen Elizabeth 1st was the first to see the advantage of the process and triggered the innovative wave of England. If you invent the engine which runs on hydrogen and patent it then everyone can read the patent. If you don't then you run the risk that someone else will and can justifiably claim the patent rights. Your shareholders will demand a few explanations. ==== There is a difference between working within the law and totally breaching copyright and all intellectual property rights by theft. I used to recommend not filing in South America because it served only to hasten the process of Government sponsored theft. Eventually the governments realised that if they consistently stole then they were denied all the know how etc for economic development. Many nations go through the process - and copying is is probably a useful approach as long as you know when to stop. Trademarks are a different matter altogether and are frequently more valuable than any patent. The big M is worth more than many nation states but there is no patent on a McDonald's burger. My own advice is to regard a patent as a temporary protection to be used while you build the value of your trademark. Which is what the drug companies understand as evidenced by your example above. My general definition of profit is the "rent you can charge during your short term monopoly over some facet of business". In a genuine free market all profit is eventually ground out of existence. Economists are always trying to get governments to level the playing field so that monopoly profits disappear quickly because this encourages entrepreneurs to invent Schumpeters waves of creative destruction - which generate a further round of temporary monopoly rents (profit) Customers are the major benefit of this process which is why I find it curious that so many New Zealanders seem to hate the free market. They seem to prefer the corporate state of Fascism which benefits the producers (Fat cat businessmen) who of course hate the level playing field as Adam Smith so wisely observed. The great dichotomy or irony of our time. But all this has little to do with the myth which I set to challenge which is that vaults are full of patents for cars running on water, cures for cancer, everlasting light bulbs etc which have been bought up and denied to humanity. ==== The problem with the libertarian argument against intellectual property law is that it runs up against the problem of the free rider. Land used to be the most important property. Now intellectual property is. Hence we need intellectual property rights for the same reason as we needed land property rights. I am always puzzled by the libertarian hostility to intellectual property while they quite correctly defend to the death the rights to regular property. == Owen McShane compilation ends
