On Mon, 2011-02-21 at 12:26 +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > Before we blunder into this minefield without a map, would anyone like > to offer hints and tips about what would be best to submit?
Well, quite. The call for evidence is a relatively nice feature in theory, but probably not favourable to us in practice; the issue is always whether or not the base of evidence is representative. For one thing, the whole purpose of IP is generally to proprietise something: the people with the figures (financial or otherwise) are the people doing the proprietisation, who are undoubtedly going to be of a pro- leaning. Equally, it's very difficult to look at the hypotheticals of a situation. To work out the benefit (or not), one has to examine the opportunity cost, which is entirely a hypothetical exercise. So I would suggest that the only people who have any figures worth looking at are the ones spending money on IP processes, and doing the big money deals: no-one else is really going to track this kind of economic impact, but the pro-IP lobby will have plenty of "£X invested with IP protection, £(X*Y) generated as outcome" as case studies at the very least. So there's probably going to be good evidence in one direction, and virtually none in the other. It would be very interesting to see if we (collectively) could actually do some research in this area, but it's never going to happen in the time-scale set out for this call, even as a literature review. Cheers, Alex. -- This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean. http://www.betterhosted.com _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
