Monday, February 21, 2011

Regulation On Innovation

Innovation can change the world and promote development. Innovation has become a force for strengthening a country's competitiveness and maintaining harmonious development in the world. Moreover, intellectual property rights are not only the catalyst for encouraging innovation, but also the "guardian" for maintaining innovation's healthy development. 

The most important factor that led to America’s stunning success in information technology was not the free market but government regulation.  Countries that never experienced this great regulatory splintering are at a disadvantage. They are trapped in a mid-20th-century form, characterised by domineering, vertically integrated firms, which try to do everything in-house or at least keep it within their family of closely related companies. As a result, customers are beholden to suppliers, and innovations go under-exploited. 

Innovation, regulation, and the Internet, there is deep confusion about the ideas of “regulation” within our political culture and about its relationship to innovation and the Internet.  The fashion is to say that regulation harms innovation; that government-backed rules undermine creativity; that the best or most effective policy for regulators is, as Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Williams Kennard put it, to allow the “marketplace to find business solutions… as an alternative to intervention by government.”  Any talk about “regulating” cyberspace invites the breathless reply of the impatient young Capitol Hill staffer.  Innovation has always depended upon a certain kind of regulation; the greatest examples of innovation in our recent past evince this reliance.  And unless we begin to see the relationship between this type of rule and the innovation it promotes, we are likely to kill the promise of the Internet. 

Proposals to increase regulations on mobile wireless services, for example, by applying “net neutrality regulation, are often based on claims that such regulations would enhance innovation and increase consumer choice.  The business practices that would be banned by such regulations are efficient mechanisms for spreading and reducing risk, lowering transactions costs, and enhancing marketing activities, all of which contribute to innovation and choice.  While some types of exclusive agreements and other “discriminatory” practices can theoretically harm competition, the precondition for such harm to occur—i.e., market power in one or more of the affected markets—generally is not present in wireless markets. Hence, the proposed regulations cannot be justified on grounds of market failure.  Rather than increasing innovation and consumer choice, as promised, they would severely disrupt the wireless sector’s highly successful business model and significantly reduce innovation and consumer choice. 

The belief is that patents prevent “vertical innovation” and instead promote “horizontal innovation.”  Apparently, patents prevent from building onto patented technology so innovation never really advances with patents and all you can hope for is modest improvements.  Never mind that the thesis ignores reality and that those with a sophisticated understanding of patent laws and a strategy understand that companies build on patented technology constantly, and that is in and of itself a strategy, and a wise one at that.  Never mind that blocking patents exist in every technology and that causes fragility of a patent portfolio and causes every company to continue the invention march or risk obscurity. 

Trademark law is a form of intellectual property rights, which provide owners, inventors and creators of property protection from unauthorized use. The three primary forms of intellectual property are patents, copyrights and trademarks.

The US is lagging seriously behind other countries on broadband access and this is due primarily to a failure of U.S. telecom regulation.  Everyone agrees it would be better if more Americans were enjoying broadband capability in computing and telecommunications.  


Works Cited:
english.peopledaily.com
economist.com
www.prospect.org
www.heartland.org
ipwatchdog.com
www.itif.org/media/feed

Glenda Murrell

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