thedailybell.com / By Staff Report / February 7, 2013
Yet, in view of the populist skepticism about patents which has penetrated deep in the zeitgeist, the Supreme Court sharply cut back on patenting in the emerging field of personalized medicine. The Court in its recent Mayo decision cited academics and other critics to conclude that in this area patenting will actually impede innovation. – Thomson Reuters/Westlaw
Dominant Social Theme: Patents are unnecessary, impede innovation and are costly, too. Let’s get rid of them and substitute stronger copyright law.
Free-Market Analysis: Anyone following the Kim Dotcom saga must be aware that copyright has suddenly been criminalized. The US government sent a posse of FBI agents over to New Zealand to arrest Dotcom.
The charge was that Dotcom’s Megaupload cloud-based Internet storage company was allowing people to evade copyright protections and thus costing producers (especially of movies and songs) hundreds of millions.
The penalty – even though Dotcom had not been convicted of any crime – was to shut down Megaupload, confiscate its servers, put Dotcom in jail and freeze his assets.
While this draconian effort did have the immediate intended effect of ending Megaupload as a going concern, Dotcom has fought back. He’s been freed, some of his assets have been returned and he’s even founded a new version of Megaupload with stronger encryption and various additional facilities to directly promote songs and songwriters.
Dotcom is doing his best to survive in a much changed copyright environment where suddenly certain transgressions have been criminalized.
Is it possible that those behind the Dotcom attacks have decided that the 21st century is to be one featuring this sort of nuclear-strength copyright approach?
We’ve pointed out many times now that after the invention of the Gutenberg press, the top elites of the day used copyright law (at the time, just invented) to slow the dispersal of knowledge that was undermining their authority.
It was no surprise to us that copyright law is again being applied aggressively and has expanded in this era of theInternet Reformation.
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