You, DDeBar, wrote:
>It is interesting to note that most tech., drug, etc. companies require
>their employees to sign off on their IP, taking the position that, since
>they are providing an environment for the research, previous foundational
>information, etc., etc., that the IP right;y belongs to the company.
Ironically this is roughly the logic offered by Bill Bartlett againt IP
laws, namely that the inventor didn't "really" invent it--the larger
society/corporation of which he/she is a part did. I think it holds more
water in the case of the corporation however. I would have a problem with
these agreements if the employee invented something unrelated to the
company's own R&D on his own time, and the company tried to snatch it.
But a deal's a deal, and these kinds serve rationally defensible ends.
>If the
>US gov't were to take an honest position as a fiduciary of the people, many
>of the patents presently held by these companies would belong to the people
>of the US.
I wrote a letter to the editor once, back when Clinton seemed to have a
spine, after he had proposed requiring the pharmaceutical companies to
sell child immunizations to the government at govt-set prices so that all
children could get vaccinated. Our paper thundered that this interfered
with the "free market." I pointed out that there is no "free market" in
most drugs, because they are all patented, making them legal monopolies,
and that society grants these legal monopolies expecting benefits in
return, which in this case, evidently, the pharm companies were not
providing. All Clinton was proposing was countering a monopoly with a
monopsony (the buyer equivalent of what a monopoly is to a seller). Sauce
for the goose and all that. They never printed the letter. Probably
couldn't understand it.
In retrospect Clinton probably never intended the proposal as more than
PR, and I should have saved my breath.
_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H.L. Mencken
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