Eric Schmidt On How To Encourage Innovation
from the don't-see-anything-about-stronger-copyright-laws dept
A bunch of folks have been sending in Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent op-ed on how to encourage more innovation in the US. The suggestions make perfect sense and there's nothing in there that I disagree with. He says Congress should encourage more competition, and be careful not to pass legislation that favors incumbents over upstarts. This is absolutely true, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty dismal, given how big a role big company lobbyists have in drafting legislation, and given how campaign contributions work today. He also talks about more open information access and the importance of keeping talented skilled workers here, rather than pushing them to other countries.Of course, it's notable that he says nothing about intellectual property. I'm guessing this is on purpose. Technically, the lever that the Constitution supposedly gives Congress to encourage innovation is intellectual property policy -- but these days, that clearly conflicts with Schmidt's first point about not passing laws that favor incumbents. These days, that's exactly what copyright and patent policy have become: protectionist measures to prop up incumbents at the expense of real innovators.
So, on that note, it's really refreshing to see recommendations for what Congress can do to encourage innovation that doesn't include ratcheting up IP laws -- though, it's disappointing that he didn't go so far as to suggest moving those laws in the other direction.
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Filed Under: competition, eric schmidt, information, innovation
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Maybe not so disappointing...
The simple fact of writing a piece on innovation that doesn't mention intellectual property is in itself a powerful idea, since it implicitly rejects the common assumption that the two are one-and-the-same and that no discussion of innovation can take place without having IP law at the core.
I agree that I'd love to see Schmidt write a plea for IP reform, but I think that right now getting people's minds off IP and on to innovation as its own distinct concept might be a very clever approach.
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Re: Maybe not so disappointing...
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Re: Maybe not so disappointing...
I found Schmidt's piece wonderfully optimistic and of a different tone than my previous impressions of him. I'm still not sure I'd give him full credit of doing all that intentionally, but I wholeheartedly agree it would be nice to have constructive debate on the other aspects of innovation reform that went somewhere instead of stalling on the IP mess.
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NAMELESS.ONE on howto increase innovation
lesson copyright terms in any computer field to 5 years other areas of written works to 7- 10 years. AND WATCH the lazy buggers die out and the real innovation begin.
can ya dig it brothers and sisters.
R U LAZY people?
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Re: NAMELESS.ONE on howto increase innovation
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IP has almost never been about promoting the progress, it has almost always been about unfairly enriching the elite.
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2) Regarding TFA...
> Government-funded research should be made public through "a Wikipedia of ideas,"
Beat you to it, Eric!
http://www.publicdomainideas.org/
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Re:
You can't steal an idea. You can copy it, but that's different. And normally, it's called competition and that's considered a good thing.
If IP is owned by the innovators instead of by holding companies then new innovation can continue with cash from licensing their IP to the big guys. Without IP, ideas can be stolen and commoditized by the big guys and big companies don't truly innovate that technology any further - ergo the death of innovation without protection for the original innovators/inventors.
Except that's rarely the case. New companies come along and disrupt large incumbents all the time, and usually those large incumbents don't realize what's happening or why, and even if they try to copy they usually fail at it. IBM tried to copy Microsoft when it was small, and failed. Microsoft tried to copy Google when it was much smaller and failed. Blockbuster tried to copy Netflix and failed. The list goes on and on. It's not that easy for big stodgy companies to "just copy" smaller companies.
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fraud
What you mean to say is...that's what the proposed patent bill has become.
Patent reform is a fraud on America. It is patently un-American.
Please see http://truereform.piausa.org/ for a different/opposing view on patent reform.
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Eric Schmidt and Google
"So rather than posting individual idea submissions, we've decided to do something a little different. We've pooled similar ideas into a set of 16 top idea themes aimed at addressing some important common goals, from making government more transparent to driving innovation in public transport."
No winners, no names, no actual projects and as near as we can tell no money.
So screw Eric Schmidt, because he screwed us- a 150,000 entries! His word and that of Google is trash. He scammed us good but he only gets one shot.
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Patents sitting doing nothing but collecting dust
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Re: Patents sitting doing nothing but collecting dust
These companies band together and try to starve inventors into abandoning their inventions or they try to sucker the inventors in a declaratory judgment (DJ) situation in order to bankrupt the inventor.
Whole industries often conspire to freeze inventors out, Rambus is a good example of this. Bob Kearns and the intermittent wiper control is another example. Bob Kearns was one of the first dozen members of the Professional Inventors Alliance. Gordon Gould's case (inventor of the Laser) is another example.
Arguments that inventors should forfeit their inventions will only serve to further entrench transnational companies and inventors will not be willing to invest their time and money in that situation.
Even Mike Masnick will suffer, because his business does not produce anything of lasting value and all non invention based business are not creating new wealth. Someone has to be creating wealth which is then passed through a multitude of businesses which are not themselves creating new wealth. That whole food chain will wither and die without a source of new wealth.
Ronald J. Riley,
I am speaking only on my own behalf.
Affiliations:
President - www.PIAUSA.org - RJR at PIAUSA.org
Executive Director - www.InventorEd.org - RJR at InvEd.org
Senior Fellow - www.PatentPolicy.org
President - Alliance for American Innovation
Caretaker of Intellectual Property Creators on behalf of deceased founder Paul Heckel
Washington, DC
Direct (810) 597-0194 / (202) 318-1595 - 9 am to 8 pm EST.
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