April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day, the day the World Intellectual Property Organization sets aside every year to promote discussion of the role IP plays in driving innovation, creativity, social progress and economic growth. But in truth, robust discussions of these issues are already well underway. No related posts.
Read MoreThe Power of Innovative Ideas
Inflection Points for Washington and the Software Industry
The Obama Administration and Congress have reached an inflection point in the wake of the 2012 election: The country is facing a steep “fiscal cliff” that no one wants to go over, but steering away from it will require policymakers to make difficult budgeting choices that few people will like. The software industry meanwhile has [...]
Read MoreUS IP Strategy, 2.0 — Protecting Innovation in the Cloud
When Congress created the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) in 2008, cloud computing was unfamiliar to most people outside of the IT industry. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing segments of the information economy. In the interim, recognizing the potential to capitalize on efficiencies of scale and capture maximum benefit from [...]
Read MoreCelebrating the Power of Ideas
The English author H.G. Wells is thought to have said, “Human history is, in essence, the history of ideas.” How right he was considering the visionary innovators who have transformed the world with great ideas. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Johann Gutenberg, plus more modern day icons such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — to [...]
Read MoreIP: The Not-So-Secret Sauce in the US Economy
If there was any doubt, a new report from the Commerce Department makes it abundantly clear that intellectual property is the secret sauce in the US economy, officially contributing roughly one-third of the country’s GDP and more than a quarter of its employment. If you are keeping score, that comes to $5 trillion and 40 [...]
Read MoreThe Legal Gulf Between China and the West Remains Wide
What to do about China? It is the world’s second-largest economy and our second-largest trading partner, after neighboring Canada. Yet it remains the wild, wild East of the global economy, a place arguably more dangerous than anywhere else in the world for innovative U.S. companies to do business. If likely president-to-be Xi Jinping is interested [...]
Read MoreMapping the Global Policy Environment for Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the fastest-growing and most exciting new sector in the software and computing industries. IDC estimates that by 2015 revenue from public IT cloud services will account for one out of every seven dollars spent on commercial software, server, and storage offerings. Private cloud solutions could add another 10 percent or 20 percent [...]
Read MoreUS-China Mutual Interest in IPR
China’s lax protection of intellectual property rights cost IP-intensive companies in the United States nearly $50 billion in 2009, according to the International Trade Commission, and it may have cost the broader US economy more than twice that amount. But it often goes unmentioned that the pain actually goes both ways — hampering prospects for [...]
Read MoreMexico’s Impressive IP Leadership
In the global race to curb intellectual property theft and capture the myriad economic benefits that come from boosting legal software sales, Mexico is setting an impressive pace by leveraging a noteworthy combination of resources from government agencies and private industry. The country’s lead copyright authority, the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (known by its [...]
Read MoreReal Crimes with Real Victims
One of the great misconceptions about intellectual property theft is that it is little more than a nuisance crime. By this faulty reasoning, there’s no real harm in using commercial products without paying for them, and it’s no big deal if someone sets up shop to sell cheap knockoffs of the real thing. But the [...]
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