Following up on my own e-mail; http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/dinamic-content/research/documents/wp2007-1.pdf
This is the type of paper we ought to be looking for, although the result is in the "wrong" direction (I've only briefly looked over it, but it appears to be a classic correlation->causation argument, and they say things like "In terms patent activity, we observe that non-resident patent registrations are weakly negatively related to female self- employment rates", which is a large WTF to my mind). An obvious problem that stands out is that they're using data sets from the World Bank, music industry, etc. etc. - all data which I'm pretty sure will be intrinsically biased. We know that the music industry regularly peg the "cost of piracy" in the billions of Euros and bring ridiculous value lawsuits against infringers; if those economic values are being brought into the calculation it seems clear to me that the argument would weight totally in one direction. Their finding "Moreover, that a commitment to international IPR laws has a positive impact on self-employment rates" is a tremendously bizarre statement to make given that they're not looking at historic data (unless I'm misreading this). There's a nice bibliography at the back that would probably deserve some attention. 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
