On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 09:38 +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > Do you think there's an opportunity to point out these defects of the > evidence call in a way that could be included? > > Given that the pro-IP lobby will submit stuff anyway, is there much > damage in responding with whatever we do have?
Fundamentally the answer has to be yes & no; we may as well send in something and it's not likely to do much damage. I just suspect that it may well get set aside because basically we'd be telling them how to interpret the evidence which, if they're good at examining the methodology, ought to be something they can figure out for themselves. The whole SME thing is a bit of a dead-giveaway too, because the definition for SME basically covers 90% or something of businesses in this country. There's a fundamental bias in attempting to divide enterprise between small/medium and large, and as I'm sure you know an organisation of a handful of people is absolutely nothing like an organisation with 75. Government have been told time and again that micro-businesses and small business (which again covers some substantial proportion of businesses in this country, 50% if you believe some) cannot be lumped in with medium enterprise; the issues are totally different. I've not seen much sign of that attitude changing, so I don't necessarily rate our chances of changing the other fundamental biases in what they're asking for. You're probably much more qualified than I to talk about this type of bias in technical terms, and probably the best way of attempting to get this across would be to look for studies on Google Scholar (or equivalent, if someone has access to the $$ sites?) and to a basic analysis of them. If we can not only warn them about these biases, but demonstrate them in studies, that would be a powerful statement IMO. Essentially the message would need to be that they cannot extend results from large-ish SMEs, particularly those VC-funded or similar, to the wider population of business. Of course, this cuts both ways: the interpretive result could be "IP is great for business, but SMEs have neither the skills or the resources to make best of it". And fundamentally I'm sure that's true, they won't have the specialist IP skills. Is there anyone else on the list who would have time to scare up some academic papers that look at any aspect of this stuff? 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
