| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : APRIL 12, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Patent Nonsense? OWNING THE FUTURE By Seth Shulman Houghton Mifflin 240pp $25 In 1993, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) touched off a wave of temporary hysteria when it gave a California company, Compton's NewMedia Inc., a sweeping patent covering all multimedia software. Claiming that it had ''invented multimedia,'' the company immediately began billing other manufacturers for licensing fees--prompting accusations that Compton's was attempting to monopolize a whole sector of the New Economy. ''Patenting multimedia is like patenting the English language,'' complained one rival. A similar outcry arose in 1992, when the PTO granted Arizona ophthalmologist Samuel Pallin a patent on a new technique for remedying cataracts. While the law clearly gave doctors the right to claim ownership of medical innovations, they had traditionally refrained from doing so, largely because of a widespread conviction that new methods of helping people should be freely shared. Pallin's decision to violate this unwritten rule prompted people to make dire predictions. ''If the Heimlich maneuver had been patented, would one hesitate to save the hapless diner for fear of infringement?'' queried one lawyer-doctor. In Owning the Future, Seth Shulman uses Compton's, Pallin, and other similar cases to make a broad argument against private ownership of knowledge assets, such as software code, chemical formulas, and medical techniques. Unlike physical property, knowledge property is not depleted or worn out when it is used. Moreover, it costs almost nothing to disseminate it once the initial investment is recovered. Consequently, Shulman believes, inventors of software code should have weaker ownership rights than owners of such physical goods as gold. But that's clearly not what the companies that dominate the knowledge economy think. Increasingly, they're patenting everything that comes to mind--a development that Shulman paints in apocalyptic terms. ''Left unchecked, the rush to claim nuggets of the knowledge economy threatens to limit our choice and diversity, stifle innovation, and foster needless monopolies that will increase the cost of goods and services we now take for granted,'' Shulman writes. The problem is that there's almost no evidence to support this bleak forecast. The economy is growing, inflation is low, consumer choice is high, and innovation is thriving. While U.S. patent law is far from perfect, Shulman vastly underestimates the ability of the legal system to amend itself. Oddly enough, both the Compton's and Pallin cases--two of the key building blocks of the author's argument--provide excellent evidence of this. Recognizing that it had granted Compton's an excessively broad patent, the U.S. patent office reexamined the patent and eventually revoked it. Similarly, President Clinton signed legislation in 1996 making it nearly impossible for owners of medical-procedure patents to block doctors from using the innovations. In his zeal to indict the patent system, Shulman all but ignores these developments, making him a less than fully trustworthy guide to a vexing and complicated area of the law. BY MIKE FRANCE _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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