Businesses Recognizing Costs of Intellectual Property Extremism

James Kanter, The Idea Economy: Battle over right to sell knowledge, International Herald Tribune, October 2, 2005. (Thanks to Manon Ress.) Excerpt:
Ideas that are free, widely available and instantly duplicated were impossible to contemplate in the days when copyright and patent law took root, a time when the expenses needed to print, distribute and sell a book or movie were considerable. Now, the information, entertainment and technology industries say they lose billions of sales to the free exchange of ideas. Incremental advances are stalled by endless lawsuits over inventions. Drug companies are on the defensive when they refuse to share their original research....The battles pit companies against companies, creators against distributors, almost everyone against the United States — and, some say, China against the rest of the world. ''This is warfare,'' said Jerry Klein, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. ''It's a high-stakes intellectual battle, and it's very complicated.'' Companies, even those the size of Intel, could one day be blocked from marketing a particular product whose design is made up of hundreds of thousands of patents just because an opportunist has claimed ownership of a single patent, said Adam Jaffe, dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a patent expert. Some intellectuals say that the more such rights are expanded, the less good the public reaps, a benefit that government's protection of innovation once intended. And now some companies are starting to agree, arguing that the race for rights and royalties can actually harm competition. "In certain cases," said Elsa Lion, an analyst at the London research firm Ovum, "technology companies are beginning to realize they have more to gain by releasing patents to the general public than by hoarding licensing income." By giving away some of their knowledge, companies like IBM and Nokia are not just polishing their image among the Internet generation. They also questioning a business strategy that has become a bedrock of contemporary capitalism: Whoever has the most patents wins.

Source: P.Suber. Businesses recognizing costs of IP extremism. OANews Blog (2 Oct 2005) [FullText]