These quotes about intellectual property rights are from Joseph Stiglitz's The Roaring Nineties: Why We're Paying the Price for the Greediest Decade in History,
"Intellectual property rights typically make some better off (the drug companies) and many worse off (those who otherwise might have been able to purchase the drugs)." [p.209]
"Market economies only lead to efficient outcomes when there is competition and intellectual property rights undermine the very basis of competition."[p.208]
"Patents often represent privatization of a public resource, of ideas that are largely based on publicly funded research."[p.208]
"Intellectual property rights need to balance the concern of users of knowledge with those of producers. Too tight an intellectual property regime can actually harm the pace of innovation; after all, knowledge is the most important input into the production of knowledge. We knew that the argument that without intellectual property rights, research would be stifled was just wrong: in fact, basic research, the production of ideas that underlay so many of the advances in technology, from transistors to lasers, from computers to the internet was not protected by intellectual property rights . . . "[p.208]
The quotes are taken from this review in Logos
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 4, 2005 03:37 PM | TrackBack