IPR, Law, Commerce and Technology
Two days ago I had a nice meeting at the University of Washington Law Shool. I spoke with Signe Brunstad, who is the assistant director of their Center for Advanced Study on IPR (CASRIP) and it is clear that this center is one of the best in the US when it comes to research on patents. The relationship between economics and patents is regularily being explored, but there seem as if there is a lot still to do. One interesting conundrum is that the economic research on patents so far does not seem to have taken into account that patent systems and the effects they have must be viewed relatively to other systems. To argue that a patent system with the qualities q(1)...q(n) seems to have the impacts i(1)...i(n) on innovation is simply misleading. Patent systems do not evolve or work in isolation. The truly interesting question thus becomes what the impact of a certain system is given the other competing systems.
Much of the research on patents today needs to be bracketed with this as a prerequisite.
Anita Ramasastry is a well known columnist and legal scholar, andhere academic work she focuses on payments and payment mechanisms. The work she does is quite interesting, and she may easily be one of the most knowledgeable American scholars (and European) when it comes to the so-called e-money directive. In her columnist work she focuses on privacy issues, and all her columns are interesting and often thought-provoking.
She is one of the founders of the Center of Law, Commerce and Technology at the UoW, and she works with trying to make sure that ICT-issues are discussed horizontally in legal education. This is, sadly, rare today - in both the US and in the EU.
But the overall observation after meeting with a few different law schools in the US is even more interesting: here they train lawyers. We - at least in Sweden - train judges. This is a fundamental - yes - flaw in our system. We need more of the rhetoric and argument, and less of the make-believe reasonable balancing in our legal education.