[PEN-L:595] Re: Copyrights and the new world order

[Bill Rosenberg <w.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman wrote

> ....
> The advanced countries will let the rest of the world sell
> commodities on competitive markets.  The advanced countries will
> sell intellectual property. Pharmaceuticals, software, music .... ,
> reaping the rewards of a non-competitive market.

This is the crux of the matter. I don't have the figures in front
of me but a huge proportion of registrations of patents and similar
forms of intellectual property (like 80-90% from memory) are by
corporations. That doesn't necessarily mean huge creative energy
- just that they patent everything that moves. That implies that the
majority of commercially available IP will come from those advanced
countries - mainly the triad of US, EC and Japan. We in New Zealand -
not to mention the much less economically developed countries - are
net purchasers of IP by a huge amount. In fact, with few exceptions,
if we produce any commercially expoitable IP ourselves, the only
way it gets marketed is by being bought by one of those corporations.

Do the corporations need to get our rent to be creative? Some work
was done on that for the GATT TRIPs debates. It seems that countries
like Turkey, where IP laws are not nearly as stringent, do just as
well in having such products available to them. Where there's
money there's a salesman ready to sell.

>
> Here is a question I have been pondering.  How much do you think
> that an average line of Microsoft code is worth?  Any guesses?  I
> don't have the answer, but I suspect that it is more than most of us
> make in a year.

Microsoft's net income year ended June 1998: US$4.49 billion. It is
said there are already about 30 million lines of code in Windows/NT
5.0 beta. Lets say Microsoft has 100 million lines of code
altogether. That's an annual income of about US$50/line. A few orders
of magnitude out, Michael!

But MS's income is still astounding - and that's while much of the
Third World pirate 90% of their software, which says that IP monopoly
rights for the likes of MS should be reduced, not tightened.

Bill

Bill Rosenberg, w.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx