The NDN Globalization Initiative has released a report entitled "The Idea-Based Economy and Globalization: The Real Foundations of American Prosperity in the 21st Century," by Dr. Robert J. Shapiro.

He writes of the changing landscape of economic value:

Federal Reserve data show that since the mid-1990s, U.S. companies have invested as much in intangibles–mainly the intellectual property of patents and trademarks, as well as databases, branding, organizational changes and the training or human capital to use these ideas–as in physical assets, from equipment to land and buildings. For the first time, intangible assets are more important business investments than physical assets.

This shift is evident in the way U.S. and international investors value America’s public companies. In 1984, the market value of the physical assets of the top 150 U.S. public companies – their “book value” – accounted for 75 percent of the total value of their stocks. A firm was worth nearly what its plant, equipment and real estate could be sold for. By 2004, the book value of the top 150 U.S. corporations accounted for 36 percent of the total value of their shares. Nearly two-thirds of the value of large companies now comes from what they know and the ideas and relationships they own.

Continue reading NDN Globalization Initiative Report Out . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:51 AM | International , Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | TrackBacks (0)| Post a Comment (1)

Today, the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee will host its annual State of the Net Conference. One of the panels is titled “Internet Copyright Filters: Finding the Balance.” I suspect it will feature episodes of a peculiar condition now impeding public-policy analysis. This condition can be called “technological schizophrenia,” or “technophrenia” for short. Despite the name, technophrenia is less a mental disorder than a context-specific example of doublethink.

Technophrenia arises from a brute fact of modern life: Most technologies, while advancing, are still imperfect—they don’t do exactly what we might want them to do in a perfect world, so they inevitably have costs, as well as benefits. Assessing the relative costs and benefits of imperfect technologies could be fairly said to be the key to most debates about copyrights and digital technologies.

Technophrenia inhibits this assessment process by imposing radically different standards depending upon whether a given technology promotes copyright infringement or copyright protection. The technophrenic claims that infringement-promoting technologies must be tolerated and embraced because their profound imperfections might someday decline. But imperfect technologies that protect copyrights are intolerable—even if their minor imperfections would decline over time—because, in the interim, some small quantum of lawful or noninfringing use might be deterred.

To see technophrenia in action, consider how the public-interest group Public Knowledge (“PK”) confronted two questions about technologies whose relative levels of “imperfection” differed most profoundly.

Continue reading Technophrenia, Piracy, and Filtering . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 9:42 AM |

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

A report from the Financial Times on an important ruling in the UK-

Hi-tech companies will be able to patent software programs after a key court decision that may move the UK closer to Europe in its treatment of computer related inventions.

The (UK) High Court yesterday said that the Patent Office was incorrectly applying the law in automatically rejecting claims for computer programs, in a case brought by four small British businesses.
...
If companies can show that their programs make a substantive inventive contribution they will be eligible for protection regardless of the fact that they are distributed on a computer disc, the court said.

The ruling should help level the playing field in an industry dominated by corporate titans such as Microsoft and Oracle, intellectual property experts said.

"This is a win for hard-working inventors and small businesses, who need patent protection to take advantage of any niche in the market," said Ed Round, a patent attorney at Marks & Clerk.
...
The decision should ease the burden on small technology companies who were going to Europe to seek patent protection, where the hurdle for computer-related patents is generally lower, lawyers said.

posted by Noel Le @ 11:20 AM | International

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | TrackBacks (0)| Post a Comment (1)

Sun has announced its acquisition of MySQL.

As IPcentral Academic Advisory Council member Professor Ronald Mann has argued, proliferation of FOSS firms will result in greater concentration in the technology sector. FOSS firms will either be integrated into traditional organizations, or aggregate with one another in order to compete against them. Even though FOSS markets have low barriers to entry, FOSS firms are challenged to stand-alone.

posted by Noel Le @ 10:31 AM | Free Culture Movement

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | TrackBacks (0)| Post a Comment (0)

Tom Sullivan from InfoWorld reports-

Bill Snyder has some advice for Red Hat. Move over, open source ain't what it used to be. "Perhaps the most startling statistic is this: IBM's open source revenue in 2007 was equal to that of Red Hat, the largest and most influential open source company. Not only did IBM equal Red Hat's open source revenue, but the next largest revenue earners were Sun and Oracle," Snyder explains. "The days of the freewheeling open source movement are numbered. Is this bad news for open source? Not at all. Open source software is more than good enough to stand on its own merits, no matter who owns it. And it's about time that the hardworking visionaries of the open source movement were rewarded with good jobs and high returns on their money and sweat."

...the growth of open source business will continue to rely on integration into traditional commercial value chains of large corporations that appropriate returns from other parts of the chain through proprietary means of return. Open source can be viewed primarily as a means of firms commodotizing industrial markets where they want to reduce the price of inputs, or markets in which they are not competitive. Big money corporate investments in open source makes sense in this context even if the open source revenue stream does not suggest a net gain for the corporate adopter. Consequently, open source has been “unduly romanticized.” It does not change traditional business economics nor signify the displacement of profit motive with altruism on the part of firms like IBM, Intel and Sun.

posted by Noel Le @ 10:07 AM | Free Culture Movement

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | TrackBacks (0)| Post a Comment (0)

One consistent argument from the FOSS Movement is that it represents something new and unprecedented, even revolutionary. However, as Siva Vaidhyanathan from NYU argues, one must be careful when asserting modern phenomena as any kind of “radical rupture in the flow of history.” FOSS development-technologies have been around for decades, subject to business, societal and technological dynamics. FOSS is nothing new, and changes little in terms of economics and industrial organization. Ironically, a major source of misunderstanding over FOSS also exemplifies how FOSS has long been established in the technology sector- IBM.

An excellent history of IBM that helps explain the firm’s current backing of FOSS was released by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Daniel Garcia-Swartz. Pragmatism Not Ideology: IBM's Love Affair with Open Source Software (2008). The scholars argue that IBM has long embraced practices similar to its current FOSS strategies.

… IBM’s apparently contradictory position is nothing new. Software can be open or closed source; it can be free or for-profit; and it can be written collaboratively with users or not. IBM has been writing software for more that half a century, and during that time it has delivered software with practically every combination of these attributes. IBM has never had any ideological commitment to one form of software creation or another; its strategy has always been entirely pragmatic, and aimed at maximizing the business opportunity determined by the economic and technological environment of the day.
…
…in the 1950s IBM followed what today would be called an open source model—its software source code was open, free of charge, and written collaboratively with its users. By the mid 1980s, all of these attributes had been reversed—IBM’s software was closed source, sold or leased independent of hardware sales, and written without the collaboration of its users. It was then operating much as any other independent software vendor. In the mid 1990s… the company embraced both open systems and the open source model. Since then IBM has been in a state of transition, achieving a balance between free, open source software and proprietary software...

Continue reading FOSS Is Nothing New . . .

posted by Noel Le @ 12:17 PM | Academia , Free Culture Movement

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (1)

Dr. KD Raju from Jawaharlal Nehru University-New Delhi released a study on worldwide government technology policies and open source software. Is the Future of Software Development in Open Source? Proprietary vs Open Source Software: A cross Country Analysis, Journal of Intellectual Property Rights, Vol. 12, No.2, (2007).

Surveying open source initiatives across Brazil, China, Europe and India, Raju observes increasing proposals and adoption of open source preference policies. However, Raju cautions that such preferences do not address the enormous impact that technology policy can have on economic development, industrial organization and innovation.

There is no reason to believe that … proposed governmental promotion of OSS increases social welfare. The argument of economic and technology development with the help of OSS is also weak. For example, India achieved the present level of economic progress with the help of proprietary software rather than OSS….
…
Some governments are taking decisions mostly on political reasons without analyzing technological and economic needs.
…
The argument of economic development through OSS is not proved by empirical data. It is a common fact that any industry development needs proper investment and development … the sustainable profit making is absent in the OSS set up.

posted by Noel Le @ 11:35 AM | Academia

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

The OECD released new research on emerging national innovation practices in member countries. I found several salient points-

More and more OECD governments are giving firms tax breaks to drive innovation while cutting their direct (federal) spending on business R&D and are also encouraging public research organisations to commercialise their inventions, according to a new OECD report.

Tax breaks OECD governments recognize the importance of private sector investment in innovating activity. Commercial entities are in the best position to gauge technological areas sustainable by business supply-consumer demand market dynamics. Tax breaks give businesses further incentive to undertake basic R&D for innovations spanning years ahead rather than merely focusing on applied R&D or tweaking existing inventions.

Cutting back federal business R&D By shifting reliance for business R&D onto commercial entities, OECD nations' observe the argument by many economists, such as Michael Porter, that innovation is the providence of the business sector and not government. Historically, nations that fostered private commercial activity experienced greater economic growth and innovation than those unsupportive of private enterprise. Even when governments played central roles in developing new technologies, such as DARPA funding of early Internet technologies, successful policies encouraged for-profit business participation.

Commercializing public research Increasing innovation through commercialization of public research is consistent with the ex-post economic justification for patents and technology transfer policies such as the Bayh-Dole Act (and its foreign counterparts). Innovation in public R&D best serves society through commercialization by getting out of the lab and into useful application.

posted by Noel Le @ 10:08 AM | International

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

One of the curiousities of intellectual battles is the ability of the intelligentsia of one school to retrench and come back, using the vocabulary popularized by another set entirely to argue the opposite point. (A curiousity because one would hope that the relatively clever would steer clear of rhetorical devices in favor of clarity and making real progress towards understanding).

Free-marketers in the nineteenth century, then known as "liberals," became popular with the working classes and the poor because of their support for the abolition of the Corn Laws and other benefits of free trade; economic interventionists tried to capitalize on this popularity by calling themselves "liberals," and today the original reference of the term is obscured, particularly in the United States.

Another more complicated example: The success of free marketers in demonstrating that competition and choice serves consumers; offering empirical support for the fundamental point that contracts are a basic building block of a prosperous economic order. Today advocates of regulation build on this legacy by borrowing the language of consumer choice to attack the ordinary contract.

The Wall Street Journal Europe explores a variation on this argument concerning the iPhone. Kyle Wingfield notes, "Yes, consumers benefit from economic efficiencies. But it cannot be said that economic efficiencies are gained simply by creating circumstances that are attractive to consumers." And goes on to make some interesting observations about the leftist allegiance to labor, rather in tension with their stance on consumers.

Continue reading The iPhone and Consumers--Lessons from Europe . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 10:46 AM | Prices, Terms, and Licensing , Spectrum & Wireless

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

VNUNET reports that IBM recently declined to open source the OS/2 operating system (again). This is not a surprising development. If IBM leveraged OS/2 as a spin-out FOSS project, sustained by community developers, it may find limited value capture in providing complementary technologies and services. The operating system was never that popular, and IBM stopped support several years ago. Still, one must ask whether the Free Culture and FOSS movements are seething that consumer welfare and the freedom to tinker have been diminished because they cannot access the OS/2 code.

posted by Noel Le @ 2:48 PM | Free Culture Movement

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (2)

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 1:11 PM | International , Patents , Pharma

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (1)

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:57 PM | Patents

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:52 PM |

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (1)

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:32 PM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:14 AM | Media: Video, Music...

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (3)

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 12:09 PM |

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 12:35 PM | Enforcement & Remedies , Media: Video, Music...

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment |  | Post a Comment (0)