Climate Change Bill Includes IP Protections 236
moogsynth writes "Buried in section 329 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (H.R. 2410), voted in recently, are measures to oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP rights in the green tech of American companies. Peter Zura's patent blog notes that 'the vote comes in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations in December as part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. ... Previously, there was sufficient chatter in international circles on compulsory licenses, IP seizures, and the outright abolition of patents on low-carbon technology, that Congress felt it necessary to clarify the US's IP position up front.'"
Re:I'm so sick of the American Congress (Score:5, Interesting)
In a case like this, it would be trivial to argue that, since technology is almost certainly a component of any viable response to climate change, and since IP is arguably connected with technological development, IP protection is arguably related. If you are subtle enough, you could easily slip in broad enough wording that your climate change bill has ramifications for all kinds of IP, while ostensibly remaining "on topic".
It might be possible, and would certainly be desirable, to curb the worst abuses; but there is essentially no way to attack the (large) grey area.
Whats wrong with that? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Whats wrong with that? (Score:4, Interesting)
- a house with a small scorched area and be bankrupted
- live in a burnt out foundation with your savings
Sounds like a great solution to making "green power technology more profitable it's really not that bad is it?"
(Yes I am ignoring insurance etc.)
Re:It's a token law. (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone else getting tired of these posts which spew strange accusations, and which don't cite any reputable sources? Maybe you're correct, but it sounds wrong and it sounds like yet more FUD coming from the right wing. Your sig said something about the "center right" so I'll trust your word more then some of those dorks on the far right.
"Citation needed"
And global warming compliance may be expensive, but it's probably cheaper then the alternative. And at least we'll be pomoting some useful science and creating some jobs during the process. A bit like building military items or building roads.
A win for big Oil? (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that the oil companies own a lot of energy technology patents it's quite possible that this is a bad thing because they still control when that technology will be released and use those patents offensively for any one re-inventing a technology that is actually effective.
Unintentionally, this bill could be consolidating the oil companies control of the energy market because viable technologies are not being allowed to make it to market.
Re:It's a token law. (Score:5, Interesting)
You should read this month's Scientific American cover story "The Top 10 myths about Sustainability", which discusses why the sustainable approaches do not lower the standard of living.
Scientific American is wrong and by the end of this summer I'll have an open source computer model that explains why. The problem is increased efficiency demands increased complexity. This complexity implies that that the cost increase of a more efficient system is actually exponential, not linear, such that, going from 10% efficient to 50% efficient is pretty cheap, but it gets way more expensive after that.
This raises the price of the good, which in turn, causes some people to stop buying that product. Because there are less purchasers, while the complexity driven capital cost remains the same, the unit cost goes up. So, more people drop off, and the cost goes further up. Eventually, the good cannot be produced at all.
Right now, you see this in Health Care in the USA. Everyone can blame it on the lawyers or the capitalists but really a lot of it is just sheer complexity of care. Complexity drives the cost up, and a ton of people drop out of the system, driving costs up more for everyone else. For health care, the only way out is rationing of some sort, coupled with mandates to keep everyone in the system, but that doesn't really control costs as much as it does stave off the doom of complexity for a bit longer.
We'll see the same, though, as we exhaust our resources of any kind. You might have more complex systems that can use them more efficiently, but they will get so expensive that what will happen is that the resource will not get used at all. A drop in the standard of living is inevitable.
Re:It's a token law. (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with health care in the US is the doctors make sure more people cannot become doctors, allowing them to charge as they please.
Specialists especially.
the US has too few doctors per capita, yet good candidates are turned down by schools, as the school has reached its AMA quota
Re:It's a token law. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a numbers guy, and I haven't seen them, so you may be right - we might have a lower standard of living here in the US. But if we don't curb global warming, I see huge refugee camps forming, where people starve to death and start wars (and the defense dept agrees). So be sure to include those factors in your program: the # of dead parents and starving children. And come to think of it, if New Orleans refugees in Texas were any indication, the US will not be a happy place either, although they'll probably be alive and fed well.
I'm not trying to troll, but its how I feel and can't figure out a less inflammatory way of sayin it. Please try to extract the logic part w/out the emotion
Re:America is full of itself (Score:3, Interesting)
Even environmentalists who attended the conference hated the Kyoto treaty. It was based entirely on political concerns and wrangling rather than actual environmental data or facts.
Re:America is full of itself (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm so sick of the American Congress (Score:5, Interesting)
"see for example the 224 co-sponsors (over half the House) of The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009"
That is a pretty easy bill to garner widespread support. After the last year of shenanigans out of the Fed and Treasury I think just about everyone is realizing fiat currencies are bad, as is letting a hand full of people who don't really answer to anyone control it.
A week or so ago a couple Japanese nationals were caught in Italy trying to smuggle what appear to be $135 billion in U.S. Treasury bearer bonds in to Switzerland, in $500 million and $1 billion denominations. Either Japan was trying to quietly dump their vast T-bill holdings in Switzerland because they don't trust the U.S any more and didn't want to be too conspicuous about it, or there are some other shenanigans going on. If they are genuine Italy may have erased a big bunch of their deficit thanks to a customs checkpoint who found the false bottom in a suitcase.
There are strong suspicions Bernanke and Paulson intentionally froze up the credit markets to coerce $700 billion out of Congress and transfer to Wall Street. The hundred plus billion that went to AIG went in one door and out the other to a number of large firms who desperately needed payoffs on their credit default swaps that AIG couldn't pay. Paulson's old firm Goldman Sachs got billions of dollars with no strings attached from U.S. tax payers through AIG, and chances of AIG paying it back are slim. The firms who had credit default swaps through AIG on their toxic mortgages came out smelling like a rose thanks to the U.S. tax payers and Paulson pulling strings to protect his old firm.
There are also rumors the Fed has been using their printing press to intervene in the stock market at the end of the day to manufacture the unusual rally of recent months. One sure way to break the psychology of a depression is to make the stock market always go up. Unfortunately doing it by printing funny money makes the entire U.S. economy a sham.
Its not even a rumor, its a fact Bernanke has been using the Fed to print money to buy U.S. treasury bills to prop up the massive U.S. government debt and to try to keep treasury and mortgage rates down. That stinks no matter how you look at it, the U.S. fed printing money to bankroll U.S. government debt, and since T-bill rates are spiking lately it doesn't seem to have even worked.
Everyone thinks its a wacko's rant but fiat currencies really are inherently dangerous. They are fine when responsibly managed and there is no stress, but as soon as a crisis develops and irresponsible managers start printing money to get out of it, they can wipe out people's life savings in no time through hyperinflation.
Re:America is full of itself (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sad? (Score:3, Interesting)
nyone have anecdotes for green technology IP that originates in the U.S.?
Efficient polymer solar cells [eurekalert.org] UCLA
Angle-independent anti-reflective coating for solar cells [eurekalert.org] RPI
Printed solar cells [venturebeat.com] Semiprius
Concentrating photovoltaic technology [greenvolts.com] Greenvolts
Shallow drilling geothermal [groundsourcegeo.com] GroundSource Geothermal
This is a Monsanto rule. (Score:3, Interesting)
And it was totally obvious that this happened. Monsanto hat huge revolving doors with the government.
Seriously. Microsoft, the oil industry, the pharma industry, the media industry... in terms of the chance to fuck us all up, they are all complete jokes, compared to that company.
There was a very well-made reportage on the French-German TV channel arte, looking behind it in a serious manner:
English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_OJcPKEYDE [youtube.com]
German: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7781121501979693623 [google.com]
French: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8723985684378254371 [google.com]
Also available via BitTorrent.
Re:It's a token law. (Score:3, Interesting)
Economics 101 assumes that the two sides of the bargain are on relatively equal footing. If one side of the bargain has an unfair advantage, then economics 101 no longer applies. That is why there are laws against insider trading in the US.
That's also why econ 101 doesn't apply to health insurance. Even if you get rid of things like pre-existing condition limits, the consumer will never be able to adequately judge which health insurance provider is best for them any more than they were able to judge the relative risks/rewards of an ARM vs. a fixed rate mortgage. The market is just to complicated and specialized for even a well educated consumer to make a decision, so they are forced to rely on a possibly unscrupulous insurance broker, or maybe just throw a dart at a board to choose the "best" health care plan for them. Adding more insurance providers would only make a difficult situation even worse, while minimizing the one benefit that the big insurance providers have: economies of scale.
this article [newyorker.com] from this month's New Yorker looks at the city with the most expensive health care in the US (almost double the national average). It looks at quality of care, success rates and a variety of other factors, yet the only place where McAllen, TX is above average is in cost. So it asks where all that extra money goes. Interestingly, while it's not really accurate to say that competition is the cause of the increased costs, it is fair to say that capitalism is.
The article is very definitely worth reading. It brings up several key issues that I have not heard addressed in the health care debate previously. It doesn't propose a solution to the funding issue (single payer, public option, or stick with private insurers), but it does propose some simple fixes that will go a long way to reducing health care expenses regardless of which system we end up with. There's no single magic bullet that will fix the health care crsis in America, but the smarter care suggested by the article will do a lot more than just adding more doctors or insurers.
Re:America is full of itself (Score:3, Interesting)
> Saying that signing the Kyoto is sadomasochistic is ridiculous. That would be like calling
> a 500 pound man who puts himself on a diet sadomasochistic.
Right. And it's not like we europeans have a lower standard of living, _despite_ of consuming only half the amount of oil, and producing half the amount of co2 per capita.