Over the past couple of days, I was at a symposium on The Economics of IP Based Transactions, put on by the National Knowledge & Intellectual Property Task Force. The sessions were rich, and will produce more thoughts in the future. For now, two, one on patents and one on copyrights:

Patents

One presentation focused on the impressive ongoing initiatives to improve databases and search capacities for patent-related information. Success here, and it looks doable, would greatly enhance access to prior art for both applicants and examiners, would improve patent quality, and would help focus inventive energy on new problems rather than recycled ones.

Meanwhile, up on the Hill, there are pending legislative proposals that are old-technology, lawyer-based efforts to add layers of procedure to the patenting process, on the theory that multiplying layers of review will improve decisions.

Success in the information technology efforts will obsolete many of the proposed reforms. Someone should tell Congress.

Copyrights

The sessions focused on making patents into marketable, tradable property. Someone raised the possibility of doing something similar with copyrights, but the idea was jettisoned on the grounds that copyright law, with its odd terms and inscrutable fair use rules, prevents copyrights from being specific enough to be traded via anything except a face-to-face specific negotiation.

This state of affairs is not in anyone's interest. The object of creating such markets is to bring capital together with people who can produce value, and creators of IP are certainly in this category. So reforming the substance of copyright law so as to allow the creation of trading markets would be much to everyone's benefit -- artists, middlemen, consumers.