{"id":21766,"date":"2014-11-07T12:24:20","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T17:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=21766"},"modified":"2014-11-07T12:27:34","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T17:27:34","slug":"wsjs-gordon-crovitz-veers-off-course-on-intellectual-property-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/21766\/wsjs-gordon-crovitz-veers-off-course-on-intellectual-property-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"WSJ’s Gordon Crovitz Veers Off Course on Intellectual Property Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each Monday, The Wall Street Journal’s<\/em> “Information Age” column by L. Gordon Crovitz is a must-read.\u00a0 His analyses are invariably intelligent and his policy positions are usually wise.<\/p>\n

On intellectual property (IP), however, Crovitz occasionally hits discordant notes.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this week provided another example.<\/p>\n

In “Even Silicon Valley Tilts Republican<\/a>,” he highlights the surprising news that this year, technology companies reversed tradition and gave 52% of their political contributions to Republicans.\u00a0 He also touches upon the topic of patent law reform, which CFIF has broadly supported<\/a>.\u00a0 But then he veers off logical course by maligning patent rights, specifically with regard to software patents:<\/p>\n

Patents make little sense for software, which almost always builds on an earlier work.\u00a0 There are some 250,000 potential patent violations in smartphones alone.\u00a0 Companies known as ‘patent trolls’ stockpile patents to extract huge settlements from technology companies, not to build products.\u00a0 Plaintiff lawyers joke that their focus has gone from ‘PI to IP.’\u00a0 Now that personal-injury litigation has been reformed in many states, they’re turning to intellectual property lawsuits such as patent infringement.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s difficult to fathom how Crovitz continues to make such a claim.<\/p>\n

The United States maintains by many measures the world’s strongest patent and IP protections.\u00a0 It also leads the world in technological innovation, including software and smartphones.\u00a0 That’s not coincidence.\u00a0 It’s cause-and-effect.\u00a0 In an excellent recent piece for IPWatchdog.com<\/a>, patent attorney Gene Quinn offers a superior analysis on IP rights and innovation in such areas:<\/p>\n

Why will anyone invest the extraordinary sums of money to create the innovations we want without an expectation of exclusivity that will allow for a recoupment of the investment plus a reasonable return on investment?\u00a0 ‘The Truly Staggering Cost of Inventing New Drugs unveils a Forbes<\/em> study finding:\u00a0 ‘The average drug developed by a major pharmaceutical company costs at least $4 billion, and it can be as much as $11 billion.’\u00a0 And it is pure fiction to believe that software development doesn’t follow the same economic realities.\u00a0 When IBM produces one of their large-scale projects, there will have been many hundreds of people working on the software solution for at least several years.\u00a0 The same is true for a new Apple operating system, or the next version of Microsoft Windows.\u00a0 It is pure fantasy to believe that software programs are written over a long weekend by a single person who is merely a second-year engineering student.\u00a0 Software that is compatible, secure and actually works is rare these days, and takes real development effort, which costs real sums of money.\u00a0 The quickest way to get less innovation is to destroy the patent system.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quinn is correct, and the real-world facts speak for themselves.\u00a0 Strong patent protections spur the innovation for which America and its tech sector are known.\u00a0 Moreover, there isn’t anything inherently wrong if a patent holder with no ability or intention of manufacturing or marketing an invention sues for violation.\u00a0 A patent right is simply a property right enforceable by law, just as a songwriter can rightfully sue for infringement even if he or she didn’t have the ability to sing the song, assemble a band, reserve a recording studio or find an agent.<\/p>\n

That obviously doesn’t mean that we should in any way condone the filing of frivolous lawsuits based upon false claims of patent infringement.\u00a0 But it does mean that much of the “patent troll” problem can be resolved via litigation reform<\/a>, such as requiring greater specificity in court pleadings and shifting of attorneys’ fees and costs to more of a “loser pays” system.<\/p>\n

What we don’t want to do is demonize patent rights, which have been the foundation for American innovation through the decades and centuries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each Monday, The Wall Street Journal’s “Information Age” column by L. Gordon Crovitz is a must-read.\u00a0 His analyses are invariably intelligent and his policy positions are usually wise. On intellectual property (IP), however, Crovitz occasionally hits discordant notes.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this week provided another example. In “Even Silicon Valley Tilts Republican,” he highlights the surprising news […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2871,2872,1442,4544,1406],"class_list":["post-21766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-intellectual-property","tag-ip","tag-patent","tag-patent-reform","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21768,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21766\/revisions\/21768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}