A Stroll Through Patent History
Teresa Riordan,
New York Times,
Sept 29, 2003
"Developing countries like India, which is scheduled to come into full compliance with an international patent treaty in 2005, may be better off without strong patent laws." Many people have been saying this for a while, but this author has come up with some proof. Instead of looking at patent libraries, the locus of most such reserach, Petra Moser used exhibition catalogues from the 19th century to get a less sanitized view of invention. She observes, "Many of the best innovators in what was the high technology of the day came from some of the smallest countries in Europe, and these nations did not have patent laws... Exhibition data are particularly useful for studying the effects of patent laws on innovation because they measure economically useful innovation in a way that is independent of changes in patent laws. Countries without patent laws were really doing quite well."
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