----- Original Message ----- From: "Eugene Coyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Bill, go for the big drug take-over!!! > Years ago Wassily Leontief (Nobelist?) took up a question in the > Harvard Law Review -- whether the government ought to get the patents from > research done with public money -- and concluded that it should. "On > Assignment of Patent Rights on inventions made under government contracts", > Harvard Law Review, Vol 77, No. 3, January 1964. Reprinted in Essays in > Economics: Theories and Theorizing. Oxford Univ Press 1966. A much better > analysis than that Jackson Hole thing by Summers and DeLong that Ian put us > on to a while back. > > Gene Coyle > =============== Well it's one thing to assign the patent rights to the state and a *big* mess in terms of constructing contracts/incentives to insure the patents are turned into products that are capable of securing a growing stream of revenue to the public coffers. It will take a long time to undo the mischief Bayh-Dole has created. Right now, Livermore labs alone has stuff in the R&D pipeline that will be worth billions in the future yet the US has legislation on the books that will make the stuff as easy to grab as mineral rights under the 1872 mining law. I queried Brad on the philosophical justifications for the origins of property rights after looking at his paper. All he said was that he didn't like the Lockean paradigm.....even though his paper reeks of it. At the same time there has been some interesting lefty stuff on property rights that has relevance to these kinds of issues. I'll just list one below folks might be interested in. ==================== "Entitlement" by Joseph William Singer In this important work of legal, political, and moral theory, Joseph William Singer offers a controversial new view of property and the entitlements and obligations of its owners. Singer argues against the conventional understanding that owners have the right to control their property as they see fit, with few limitations by government. Instead, property should be understood as a mode of organizing social relations, he says, and he explains the potent consequences of this idea. Singer focuses on the ways in which property law reflects and shapes social relationships. He contends that property is a matter not of right but of entitlement--and entitlement, in Singer's work, is a complex accommodation of mutual claims. Property requires regulation--property is a system and not just an individual entitlement, and the system must support a form of social life that spreads wealth, promotes liberty, avoids undue concentration of power, and furthers justice. The author argues that owners have not only rights but obligations as well--to other owners, to nonowners, and to the community as a whole. Those obligations ensure that property rights function to shape social relationships in ways that are both just and defensible. "The appearance of a book on property law from Singer--one of the most interesting and provocative legal theorists now writing on the subject--is an event of some importance, and this book lives up to expectations."--James Boyle, Duke Law School Joseph William Singer is professor of law at Harvard Law School.
