Chris Burford wrote:
>"American intellectual property is our greatest trade asset."
>
>said by one on the victors side of the Napster case
>
>Is that now true?
>
>Any figures?
Depends on what you want to call American IP. If you're including
Boeing aircraft, Intel processors, and Merck pharmaceuticals, then
yes, it's a big trade asset. If you're talking Hollywood and pop
music, they're central to the cultural dimensions of Empire, but
economically rather minor.
Doug ***********
Although, according to Fortune 500 annual, among the most profitable. As an aside, I came across this while looking into the compulsory licensing issue:
From: <http://www.ftc.gov/opp/global/GC112995.htm> [Effects of government inaugurating CL on Corps.]....
.... So with that, I'd like to start by introducing Mr. Scherer, who is a Larsen Professor of Public Policy and Management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He has also taught at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Swarthmore College.
>From 1974 to 1976 Professor Scherer was the chief economist here at the Federal
Trade Commission. Professor Scherer's research specialties are industrial
economics and the economics of technological change, and he has written numerous
books on these topics.
Professor Scherer is on the editorial boards for both the Journal of Economic Literature and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Among other things, he is also the past President of the Industrial Organization Society and the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society.
Welcome back, Professor Scherer.
MR. SCHERER: Well, thank you very much, Madam Chairman. It's a pleasure to return to the scene of my former crimes. Actually, this is a voyage of rediscovery, not only because I was at the Federal Trade Commission 20 years ago, but it really returns me to my very early days of scholarship.
I'm reminded of something that Learned Hand said when testifying in 1957 before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, it had a Subcommittee on Patents then. They were having a big set of hearings on the patent system, and Learned Hand prefaced his testimony by saying: I know very little about anything but least of all about patents.
Well, I feel very much like Learned Hand. I've been looking at patents now for about, a little more than 40 years. My undergraduate senior thesis was on the atomic energy patent laws and economic progress.
And I guess that put me in a framework such that when I was a student at the Harvard Business School and a group of us were required to write a long report, a book-length report on some subject, we decided to take a look at the compulsory licensing of patents under antitrust decrees.
I guess what triggered our interest was a statement, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal immediately after the announcement of consent decrees against AT&T and, I believe in the same week, IBM.
Those consent decrees put out for compulsory licensing at, essentially for past patents, zero royalties, some 9,000 patents, including basic computer patents and the basic semiconductor patents.
The Wall Street Journal editorialized as follows: "So it may turn out that these are dangerous victories the government boasts about. The settlements in these cases indicate a belief that everybody's patents should be everybody else's. But this is a philosophy that strikes at incentive. New ideas and new inventions may be lost. Such government victories may turn out to be far more costly for the nation than for the companies."
And there was much other similar editorialization at the time about these antitrust decrees. Actually in more than 100 antitrust decrees during the 1940's and 1950's compulsory licensing of patents had been ordered. There is a very good Senate Judiciary Committee report on this which I cite in my testimony outline.
Well, we at the Harvard Business School were very much fascinated by this question; and we undertook a major research project -- as much as nine students could do -- to find out exactly what was the impact of these antitrust compulsory licensing decrees on investment in research and development.
Among other things, we went out and interviewed 22 companies, and we added to that 69 questionnaires about various aspects of company patent policy and their susceptibility to compulsory licensing. We also did a very large statistical analysis and came to a number of conclusions that, at least at the time, given the way the patent system was being viewed by most scholars, were, to us, mind boggling.
One of our conclusions was that patents just weren't very important in large corporations' research and development decisions.
Of 91 respondents, only 7 accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R&D investments. Most cited patents as the least important of considerations.
Most of them said that what was really important in their research and development decisions was the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales.
A lot of the companies in our sample had, in fact, been subjected to patent compulsory licensing decrees. And the vast majority of them said that the decrees had had, at most, a very, very minor negative impact on their R&D investments.