Needed: a new system of intellectual property rights.

Abstract

The world's current system of intellectual property rights has in recent years become unworkable and ineffective. Designed more than 100 years ago to meet the needs of an industrial era, it is inadequate to handle the ownership and distribution of intellectual property generated by the brainpower industries that have come to dominate the world's economy. The prevailing wisdom is that minor tweaking can remedy the problem. But MIT economist Lester Thurow challenges such thinking and calls instead for a new system--one redesigned from the ground up. In making his case for why the old system doesn't work anymore, Thurow lays out the challenges the new system must meet. It must offer incentives to inventors that are strong enough to offset the decline in publicly funded research. At the same time, it must protect the public interest by keeping some intellectual property--basic scientific knowledge, for example--in the public domain. The new system must be flexible enough to deal with the fact that new technologies have created new potential forms of intellectual property rights (Can pieces of a human being be patented?) and have made old rights unenforceable (When books can be downloaded from an electronic library, what does a copyright mean?). And in an increasingly global economy, a new system must meet the needs of both "catch-up" states and "keep-ahead" states. A system that ignores the lesson of history--that every country that has caught up has done so by copying--will be an unenforceable one.

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