Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Alex Tabarrok on how ideas trump crises

h/t Instapundit

I watched the TED talk, which was linked via Instapundit and this online article called "The End of Stagnation and the Coming Innovation Boom".

Besides the video, I wanted to include this quote:
The most important point is blindingly obvious yet ignored: not every innovation needs or deserves a 20-year patent. It's crazy that one-click shopping or reverse auctions are granted the same 20-year monopoly rights as a pharmaceutical that took 15 years and a billion dollars to research and develop. Thus, I advocate creating classes of patents of say 20, 7, and 3 years. Shorter patents would be approved more quickly and with less investigation.

Comment:

If there were shorter patents, something like the E-cat could get a patent.  This could speed up the adoption of the technology.  In such as case, it should be a positive good to receive the benefit of a new technology as soon as possible.

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