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. [...] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
