Profits, info, & branding

[Brad De Long]

>If you ignore patents, you ignore most of the business plans even of the
>Internet companies, and you certainly ignore companies like Intel and Cisco
>that have had stock prices and profits that look pretty "New Economy", but
>are based on IP fights as much as software companies.  And a company like
>Priceline.com is basing much of its plan on its patent of the idea of people
>doing a reverse auction of offering a price and letting companies bid on
>that price.  This latter point highlights the really startling change in
>recent years where business strategies have become patentable (under the
>STATE STREET decision).  By this legal movement, if you create a new
>business, you by definition get a monopoly since you can patent the whole
>business plan and prevent any rivals from entering the business. (We'll see
>how much of this survives legally.)

How much of it do you think will survive?


>The issue is whether this legal creation of information monopolies is where
>all these profits are derived, or whether other factors are as important or
>more important. I don't know what the answer is, but my interest is what
>portion of profits are deriving from legal protection of such non-rivalous
>goods.  You mention branding as a strategy, which is still a legal area of
>information control, namely trademarks.  Trademark law in some ways is
>becoming the most imperialist of IP legal regimes, since companies have
>found that even in cases where they could not protect a good through patent
>or copyright, they were able to create control over a good through
>trademarking its design.

My favorite so far is from O'Reilly: "the association of a picture of 
a polar bear with the topic of information architecture for the world 
wide web is a trademark of O'Reilly and Associates..."


>A big problem with trademark law is that it has
>the weakest protection for public interest exceptions and has no time limit
>on government protections.

Yep.

Brad DeLong