Call for Evidence on Patents, Copyright, Enforcement, Competition and SME access to services

[MJ Ray-2]

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview/ipreview-c4e/ipreview-c4e-paper.htm

    "The Government has asked Professor Ian Hargreaves to lead a short
    review of the Intellectual Property (IP) framework (law and
    practice) to consider how it might be changed in the interest of
    promoting innovation and economic growth. The Review will take
    into account the conclusions and evidence provided to previous
    reviews in this area, but we invite fresh evidence on the extent
    to which the current IP system successfully promotes innovation
    and growth and how it could do so more effectively."

    "[...] the Review seeks economic data and related evidence which
    are methodologically sound, robust and clearly sourced. Responses
    relying on empirical data should clearly identify the methodology
    used and any critical assumptions relied upon, identify the
    source(s) of the data, and provide a copy of or a citation to each
    such source. At the same time, the Review welcomes evidence in the
    form of case-studies and individual experiences which illustrate
    one or more of the issues under consideration."

Submissions should be sent to the IP and Growth Review Team, by 4
March 2011.  They prefer submissions to callforevidence@...

Before we blunder into this minefield without a map, would anyone like
to offer hints and tips about what would be best to submit?

Thanks,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/

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[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2011-02-21 at 12:26 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Before we blunder into this minefield without a map, would anyone like
> to offer hints and tips about what would be best to submit?

Well, quite.

The call for evidence is a relatively nice feature in theory, but
probably not favourable to us in practice; the issue is always whether
or not the base of evidence is representative.

For one thing, the whole purpose of IP is generally to proprietise
something: the people with the figures (financial or otherwise) are the
people doing the proprietisation, who are undoubtedly going to be of a
pro- leaning.

Equally, it's very difficult to look at the hypotheticals of a
situation. To work out the benefit (or not), one has to examine the
opportunity cost, which is entirely a hypothetical exercise.

So I would suggest that the only people who have any figures worth
looking at are the ones spending money on IP processes, and doing the
big money deals: no-one else is really going to track this kind of
economic impact, but the pro-IP lobby will have plenty of "£X invested
with IP protection, £(X*Y) generated as outcome" as case studies at the
very least. So there's probably going to be good evidence in one
direction, and virtually none in the other.

It would be very interesting to see if we (collectively) could actually
do some research in this area, but it's never going to happen in the
time-scale set out for this call, even as a literature review.

Cheers,

Alex.


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[MJ Ray-2]

Alex Hudson wrote:
> So I would suggest that the only people who have any figures worth
> looking at are the ones spending money on IP processes, and doing the
> big money deals: no-one else is really going to track this kind of
> economic impact, but the pro-IP lobby will have plenty of "£X invested
> with IP protection, £(X*Y) generated as outcome" as case studies at the
> very least. So there's probably going to be good evidence in one
> direction, and virtually none in the other.

Do you think there's an opportunity to point out these defects of the
evidence call in a way that could be included?

Given that the pro-IP lobby will submit stuff anyway, is there much
damage in responding with whatever we do have?

Thanks,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/

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[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 09:38 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Do you think there's an opportunity to point out these defects of the
> evidence call in a way that could be included?
>
> Given that the pro-IP lobby will submit stuff anyway, is there much
> damage in responding with whatever we do have?

Fundamentally the answer has to be yes & no; we may as well send in
something and it's not likely to do much damage. I just suspect that it
may well get set aside because basically we'd be telling them how to
interpret the evidence which, if they're good at examining the
methodology, ought to be something they can figure out for themselves.

The whole SME thing is a bit of a dead-giveaway too, because the
definition for SME basically covers 90% or something of businesses in
this country. There's a fundamental bias in attempting to divide
enterprise between small/medium and large, and as I'm sure you know an
organisation of a handful of people is absolutely nothing like an
organisation with 75.

Government have been told time and again that micro-businesses and small
business (which again covers some substantial proportion of businesses
in this country, 50% if you believe some) cannot be lumped in with
medium enterprise; the issues are totally different. I've not seen much
sign of that attitude changing, so I don't necessarily rate our chances
of changing the other fundamental biases in what they're asking for.

You're probably much more qualified than I to talk about this type of
bias in technical terms, and probably the best way of attempting to get
this across would be to look for studies on Google Scholar (or
equivalent, if someone has access to the $$ sites?) and to a basic
analysis of them. If we can not only warn them about these biases, but
demonstrate them in studies, that would be a powerful statement IMO.

Essentially the message would need to be that they cannot extend results
from large-ish SMEs, particularly those VC-funded or similar, to the
wider population of business. Of course, this cuts both ways: the
interpretive result could be "IP is great for business, but SMEs have
neither the skills or the resources to make best of it". And
fundamentally I'm sure that's true, they won't have the specialist IP
skills.

Is there anyone else on the list who would have time to scare up some
academic papers that look at any aspect of this stuff?

Cheers

Alex.


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[Alex Hudson]

Following up on my own e-mail;

http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/dinamic-content/research/documents/wp2007-1.pdf

This is the type of paper we ought to be looking for, although the
result is in the "wrong" direction (I've only briefly looked over it,
but it appears to be a classic correlation->causation argument, and they
say things like "In terms patent activity, we observe that non-resident
patent registrations are weakly negatively related to female self-
employment rates", which is a large WTF to my mind).

An obvious problem that stands out is that they're using data sets from
the World Bank, music industry, etc. etc. - all data which I'm pretty
sure will be intrinsically biased. We know that the music industry
regularly peg the "cost of piracy" in the billions of Euros and bring
ridiculous value lawsuits against infringers; if those economic values
are being brought into the calculation it seems clear to me that the
argument would weight totally in one direction.

Their finding "Moreover, that a commitment to international IPR laws has
a positive impact on self-employment rates" is a tremendously bizarre
statement to make given that they're not looking at historic data
(unless I'm misreading this).

There's a nice bibliography at the back that would probably deserve some
attention.

Cheers

Alex.


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[Rob Myers]

I know it's not quantitative evidence, but this is a fun paper -

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1746343

"Intellectual property law has long been justified on the belief that
external incentives are necessary to get people to produce artistic
works and technological innovations that are easily copied. This Essay
argues that this foundational premise of the economic theory of
intellectual property is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral
economics, psychology, and business-management studies, it is now
possible to show that there are natural and intrinsic motivations that
will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of
externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights and patents."

(via Groklaw)

- Rob.

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