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So any proposal that the United States revise its length of copyright duration to anything less than the life of the author plus 50 years is a non-starter, unless there is going to be a wholesale repudiation by Congress of the Berne Treaty and the benefits of near universal protection of U.S. copyrights around the globe. Similarly, the suggestion of some that continued copyright protection be conditioned upon a physical filing and the payment of a substantial fee, would also violate our obligation under Berne to insure that copyright protection exist with “no formalities.”

The proposed reduction of the copyright term has potentially negative consequences: Reducing the copyright term based on Disney's political stances may violate copyright creators’ or owners’ First Amendment rights against viewpoint-based discrimination and the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process. In addition, the current bill would very likely put the United States in conflict with the terms of the Berne Convention. Implemented by Congress in 1998, the Berne Convention is an international treaty intended to convey a minimum set of standard legal principles and protections for literary works and currently requires a minimum copyright protection term of the author’s life plus 50 years.

While interesting and certainly newsworthy, it is likely the current effort to reduce the copyright duration will face the same fate as last year - lots of talk but little action. However, this current movement does highlight a shift in sentiment regarding works entering the public domain and the lack of appetite to enact further copyright term extensions. Essentially, all good things must come to an end, and in the case of Disney’s earliest version of Mickey, as he appears in “Steamboat Willie” in the 1928 animated short, will whistle his way into the public domain in 2024. Yet copyright owners need not despair entirely – in some cases content owners may avail themselves of other intellectual property protections, like trademarks, to protect their famous works and characters.

The United States has also undertaken efforts to promote evidence-based IP policymaking. When Congress passed legislation known as the PRO-IP Act, the US Government Accountability Office (US GAO) was directed to provide information on one particular IP issue: quantifying the impacts of counterfeit and pirated goods.1 After careful study, the US GAO (2010) reported that “despite significant efforts, it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole” (p. 27). Indeed, on examination, the US Government could not substantiate its widely cited estimates of the economic impact of counterfeiting and piracy problems. The PRO-IP Act also mandated the office of an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) to develop strategic policy. In doing so, the “IP Czar”, as she was colloquially known, began with a public call for data and ways to measure IP infringement threats, promoted on the White House blog (Espinel, 2010, pp. 66–8).

​ [intransitive, transitive] to become more powerful or effective; to make somebody/something more powerful or effective

Her position in the party has strengthened in recent weeks.

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strengthen | BUSINESS ENGLISH

It may be possible, however, to change the regulatory environment in ways which allow a higher sustained catch, and possibly with a lower level of expenditure on fishing. Let us denote the set of fishing regulations by ζ.  There are some regulations which allow fish to be caught without as large an adverse effect on the growth of the fishing stock, e.g. regulations that ensure that small fish are not caught.  We now write (4) dP/dt = H(P) – Q (P,n, ζ)M(ζ)  with M’ < 0. In other words, tighter regulations mean that the adverse effect of a given level of fishing is reduced, but Q 3 < 0, tighter regulations increase costs, and hence, at fixed P and n, lead to less fishing and a smaller catch.  It follows that with tighter regulation, the equilibrium level of P, denoted P2”, is increased. But that means that the flow of fish, H, has increased: tighter fishing regulations (in the sense defined) leads to an increased flow of fish, and this is true whether there is more or less investment in the fishing fleet. (That is, other things being equal, the increase in P results in a larger fishing fleet; but the increase in regulations leads to reduced investments, so the net effect is ambiguous.)(Figure 7) What is striking about these results, as we have noted, is that they reverse normal presumptions. Usually, general equilibrium responses diminish the magnitude of partial equilibrium responses, but do not reverse the sign.  Here (and in the analysis of the knowledge pool below) they do.    In the next section, we show that the same logic holds for innovation.    Changes in the environment which lead to more investment given a level of P, the size of the “knowledge pool,” may so diminish the equilibrium pool of knowledge (the set of technological opportunities) that the flow of innovations is reduced. This is true whether or not at the new equilibrium level of P, there is more or less investment in R & D.   

Recently, someone who took the patent bar review course I teach asked whether my views on the Supreme Court decision in Mayo v. Prometheus had changed, or moderated. Yes, my views on Mayo have changed, perhaps significantly in some ways, but they certainly have not moderated. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision this is what I know — Mayo v. Prometheus is a lawless decision by a Court that has become too powerful, and it continues to wreak havoc on the patent system and innovators. The net effect of the decision has resulted in patent protection being easier to obtain for cutting edge software, biotech, genetic and medical innovations in Europe, Canada, Australia and even China.

Any other interpretation of indemnity provision would require the words "the vessel, its owners, operators" to be ignored. Doing so would violate a cardinal rule of contract interpretation, which requires that all terms used in the contract should be given meaning and, consistently, that no terms used in the contract should be rendered superfluous. The only way to read the indemnity provision without ignoring the words "the vessel, its owners, operators, master, and crew," is to find that Arena owes indemnity to Alliance because it was both the owner and operator of the vessel at the time of the plaintiff's alleged injury.

1.15 “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION” shall mean the application, prosecution (including, without limitation, all interference actions, term maintenance, defense and enforcement of U.S. and foreign patent applications and patents arising therefrom, and establishment and protection of trade secrets and other forms of intellectual property rights.

In General.—Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation and, except as provided by the following subsections, endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death.

It is often argued that a country's long-term performance depends to a significant extent on the quality of its institutions, including its political and legal institutions (Acemoglu et al., 2005). Economic research mostly focuses on explaining long-term differences in growth rates. As seen above, some researchers argue that high inequality will reduce growth rates, among other things, because it can worsen institutional quality. However, besides facilitating economic growth, public institutions have other functions that matter from a long-term perspective. For example, disaster preparedness, education, public health, foreign policy, science policy, and many other areas could influence the expected value of the long-term future. If such things go badly, they could increase existential risk. Conversely, good institutions will help reduce existential risk. For many existential risk reduction strategies likely require public goods and collective action, which in turn require good public institutions (among other reasons, because some such public goods are unlikely to be provided by markets). So, it seems reasonable to assume that, with most other societal goals, good institutions can help deliver existential risk reduction. Here is a cheesy analogy: targeted actions like washing your hands regularly or getting a flu shot can reduce your risk of dying from an infection. But you will also do well investing in a strong immune system, as that is an ‘all-purpose good’ in lowering your risk of dying from any bacterium or virus. Investing in good institutions might similarly be an all-purpose-good: rather than tackling individual sources of existential risk directly, we improve conditions for tackling whatever existential risks may come our way.

There are several reasons why higher inequality could weaken institutional capacities for longtermist public goods.

The explosion of inequality over the past four decades is appropriately a major focus of the political agenda for progressives. Unfortunately, policy prescriptions usually turn to various taxes directed at the wealthy and very wealthy. While making our tax structure more progressive is important, most of the increase in inequality comes from greater inequality in before-tax income, not from reductions in taxes paid by the rich. And, if we’re serious about reversing that trend, it is easier, as a practical matter, to keep people from getting ridiculously rich in the first place than to tax the money after they have it.

While the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump tax cuts all gave more money to the rich, policy changes in other areas, especially intellectual property have done far more to redistribute income upward. In the past four decades, a wide array of changes—under both Democratic and Republican presidents—made patent and copyright protection both longer and stronger.

Drug prices remain a top concern for many Americans, with one in four people reporting difficulty affording their prescriptions. Politicians are taking note, with President Biden recently commenting, “We pay more for prescription drugs than any — any nation on Earth.”

In response, the White House’s new budget includes several policies that aim at the high cost of drugs. The proposed reforms include the authority for Medicare to negotiate prices and requirements for drugmakers to pay rebates to Medicare for treatments that increase in price faster than the inflation rate.

Commodity price shocks can affect the opportunity costs of engaging in conflict activities. A negative commodity export price shock would lower household income, thus incentivizing households to engage in conflict. Case studies suggest that such a mechanism influenced the outbreak of the First Ivorian Civil War in the 2000s (Woods, 2003; McGuirk and Burke, 2020). In the 1980s and 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire experienced a persistent decline in the price of coffee and cocoa exports – products on which its economy relied heavily. The decline led the state and individual producers to expand their production to compensate for lower revenues. This resulted in competition over land that could be cultivated and the rise of ethnic and religious tensions, which promoted the context for the war. On the other hand, commodity import price increases reduce households’ real income, which also lowers opportunity costs. Schneider (2008) examines news reports and finds that food price increases in 2007 and early 2008 led to the eruption of food riots in more than 20 countries. The effect of a negative commodity ToT shock working through the state capacity channel is also expected to increase conflict intensity. A negative export price shock may lower government revenue, while import price increases may increase the fiscal cost of measures such as subsidies to support the population. And In both cases, the state’s ability to mitigate the economic shock is weakened. For example, Sayne and Hruby (2016) describe that in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, falling oil revenue due to the oil price slump in 2014 and 2015, compounded by lower investor confidence and exchange rate volatility, constrained the government’s resources to address the expansion of Boko Haram in the northeast regions of the country. Finally, a negative ToT shock resulting from lower export prices would lower the gains to be made through rent capture, thereby decreasing incentives for conflict through the predation channel. Previous studies often report the significance of this channel for the oil and other natural resource sectors (e.g., Ross, 2004). Given the different expected direction of effect, the overall impact of commodity price changes on conflicts is ambiguous ex ante and requires careful regression analysis. How can economic conditions affect the likelihood of conflict? Since conflicts arise from complex political, social, and ethnic contexts, singling out an individual determinant seems infeasible. However, it is plausible to assume that economic factors, such as changes in aggregate income levels, would contribute to the dynamics that foster conflict. For instance, higher inflation would reduce purchasing power, thereby increasing the inclination of individuals to participate in violence. Less opportunities for gainful employment or reductions in salaries and wages may have similar effects. These would be the case especially in situations where governments are lacking the means to effectively mitigate economic hardship as macroeconomic shocks deplete their fiscal coffers. Recent years have seen several major economic shocks on a global scale with a negative effect on output and thus aggregate income, including the Covid-19 pandemic, an increasing number of severe climate events, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Ukraine war has had a particularly strong impact on households’ purchasing power through its effect on energy, food, and fertilizer prices (Figure 2). Low-Income Countries (LICs) have been hit the most, as they host sizeable populations of poor and vulnerable households while their social safety nets tend to remain underdeveloped (see Rother et al., 2022).

Imagine a parasite living in the US economy, siphoning off the cash that has powered the middle class for decades. We know it's there, but no one — on the right or the left — is talking seriously about how to slow its growth. This parasite is our healthcare system. It is already causing more damage to the economy than you know, and at least one group of people seems to have this figured out: the same Wall Street doomsayers who predicted the financial crisis. Here's what they know, in the broadest terms. Healthcare spending took up 4.8% of consumer spending in 1984, hit 8% in 2014, and then surged to 10% by 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Business Insider Now of course there are some on Wall Street who see this as a reason to go long, with some companies poised to rake it in as baby boomers age and costly diseases like cancer proliferate. But the crowd I'm talking about is focusing instead on what inefficiencies in pricing are doing to American wallets. They're looking at the bad actors in this healthcare system, the drug companies that are taking a 60-year-old medicine and jacking up the price, the middlemen that inflate costs by inserting themselves between patients and providers. This crowd has noticed that these bad actors are pervasive in our system. So the bet here is simple: America, one way or another, will be forced to confront the parasite that is its healthcare system, and the companies that are using the sleaziest tactics will be picked off first — by prosecutors, lawmakers, insurance companies, or the press — leaving sick customers in the lurch. Short sellers (investors who bet that stocks will go down) are talking about this thesis at conferences and sending it around in their email newsletters. They're learning about scams and picking off weak companies to bet against. They see rising costs as a bubble that will be either gently deflated through federal-government intervention or violently popped by the merciless hand of the market — with a savvy investor making money either way. We have three options for dealing with this problem going forward: We can handle rising cost with good policy and change the way we think about paying for healthcare. We can handle this with bad policy and deliberately shift rising costs to consumers while the government abdicates its responsibility for the health of not only the American people but also the American economy. Or we can do nothing, which would result in more rising costs, more corporate rent-seeking behavior, and ultimately a recession as household resources go toward medicine and treatment instead of new cars, homes, clothes, or toys. The US is hurtling at full speed toward the third option. That's because, at least realistically, the government has no plan to rein in costs. Healthcare costs today make up a sixth of the economy; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimate that the share will grow to a fifth in just eight years. Blame Bill and Mike There's an origin story for how Wall Street became aware of the gravity of this situation: Valeant Pharmaceuticals. The company's stock plunged 90% starting in October 2015 after the Street (and prosecutors) became aware of how Valeant was abusing the system to shove expensive drugs down the throat of insurance companies. In other words, Valeant — then under the guidance of CEO Michael Pearson — was the poster child for big pharma's even bigger greed. What's more, no one could ignore it because Wall Street's loudest megaphone, the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, was telling everyone and their mother what a great stock it was. He got in himself, and, like a lot of his peers, he lost his shirt. Now that the dust has settled we know what Ackman, who joined Valeant's board, should have known: Valeant was handing fat rebates to any middleman that stood in the way of getting an insurer to pay for expensive Valeant drugs. It was spending tons of money acquiring and marketing old drugs instead of developing new ones. It used its own pharmacy to push out Valeant drugs at a mind-bending rate as long as insurers would continue to foot the bill. It was finding ways to make copays disappear so customers would never know how much their drugs were costing insurers. These are just some of the games Wall Street learned how to sniff out in big pharma, and once the short sellers on Wall Street could see it, they started to see it everywhere. A few weeks ago I spoke with Andy Slavitt, the man who ran the Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare — during the Obama administration, and he briefly touched on how to improve price transparency in healthcare. "It's going to take more than a few tweets from the president to bring real reform," Slavitt said, just before he hung up the phone. "Once pharmaceutical costs reach 25% of Medicare, we're not going to like the choices we'll have to make." We can handle this well First things first: Just because we're not ready to tackle this doesn't mean the market isn't. Wall Street has noticed that the market is pushing payers in a different direction. For one, more costs have shifted to consumers (part of why everyone is so outraged), and instead of our outdated fee-for-service model that pays the industry only when people are very sick, payers are experimenting with bundled payments — structuring payment on the basis of expected costs — and selective points of care. They're also trying to avoid expensive hospitals, sending patients to lower-cost outpatient facilities for common treatments. But this is happening unevenly, and a lot can go wrong. When sick people are involved, the collateral damage of bankrupted companies and panicked executives eyeing falling stock prices can be death. So we should handle this correctly. On top of changing the way we pay for care (and thus incentivize care) we should make drug pricing transparent. We should allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. We shouldn't allow drug companies to charge Americans a premium and pretend that it's going to research and development (it's not). We should change regulations for marketing pharmaceuticals. We should curb the pharma lobby's power. There are glimmers of hope. Twenty-one states have passed laws addressing balance billing — when an out-of-network healthcare provider charges you for whatever your insurer didn't pay for. California and other states are trying to bring transparency to middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers; such companies often take a cut from drug companies and manage plans for insurers, but neither party knows the deal a PBM has cut with the other. It's secret, and it's stupid. Stocks, by the way, are starting to fall on this news: Express Scripts, the largest PBM, has seen its stock price decline by 17% over the past year. (This after one of its biggest clients, the insurer Anthem, sued it in a 2016 lawsuit accusing it of overcharging.) Stock prices for the largest for-profit hospital managers, Tenet Healthcare and Lifepoint, have fallen by 30% and 6% over the past year. The Food and Drug Administration has sped up generic-drug approval, putting pressure on prices. Unfortunately, none of this is enough. It's barely a start. Corruption still abounds, and we've done little to save ourselves from the chaos that could result from more dramatic, disorganized, market-led change. We can handle it badly So far, the healthcare debate in the US has centered on Obamacare — a program that covers about 10% of Americans — and doesn't go far enough in addressing the larger system's incentives. We're embarrassing ourselves. At least, I was embarrassed while watching a meeting of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee during the second (or maybe third) attempt to repeal Obamacare. The meeting was about curbing the rising cost of prescription drugs, and most of the Republicans were off doing something useless in secret that eventually they would have to undo clumsily in public. It was a frustrating session. Powerless Democrats listened as experts outlined ways to control costs that seemed fairly simple but are actually fairly insurmountable in our current system in which pharma money talks louder than any congressional expert witness. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, sounded exasperated. He said the Senate could solve drug pricing "in a week" if it weren't for the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling on campaign spending — the pharmaceutical industry has spent billions of dollars lobbying Congress to keep this system opaque. Whitehouse thinks billions might be overkill. "We tend to come cheaper than that," he said, disgusted. Andy Kiersz, Business Insider Now, perhaps you're saying to yourself, "Linette, Bernie Sanders has a plan." Let me stop you right there. Bernie Sanders has a political pipe dream at best (a political litmus test at worse) that won't pass one chamber of Congress, let alone two. There is no plan. We can do nothing When I say Wall Street has caught wind of this, I don't mean the whole of it. Some money managers in this market are still howling at the moon, shaking their fists at the Federal Reserve, blaming the distortions caused by low-interest rates for our economy's slow growth. But the economy is weak, in part, because of bad policy in healthcare — policy that has allowed healthcare expenditures to choke the life out of middle-class wallets. On Monday the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report saying discretionary consumer spending had finally reached the place it was in 2007. In other words, Americans are finally spending as much on things like dining out and going on vacation as they did in 2007. It's about time. As the New York Fed points out, discretionary spending recovered more slowly than it did in past downturns. NY Fed One of the reasons for this, we can extrapolate, is the rising cost of nondiscretionary spending in healthcare. In a previous report, the New York Fed noted that unlike "discretionary services, nondiscretionary services expenditures ... fell less during the recent recession than they did in the early 1980s recession, primarily because real health care expenditures held up better in this recession." In other words, healthcare is gobbling up more and more of our paychecks. Even if the government stopped paying for stuff (i.e., we get rid of assistance through programs like Obamacare) someone has to pay for our country's sick. In a service-based economy like the US this matters a lot. The New York Fed thinks that Americans aren't spending because they're saving and that they're saving because they're worried about slow growth going forward. That could be true. But it could also be true that Americans simply don't have the money they used to because out-of-pocket healthcare costs are rising. America is nothing without a growing class of people who buy school supplies for their kids, take vacations to national parks, eat out at restaurants, and do all the things middle-class Americans have done since the 1950s. That's happening less and less, and Wall Street is starting to pinpoint one inescapable, intractable reason — and there's no plan to stop it. When the next recession comes, don't be surprised if healthcare costs are what delivers it.

We predict the effects of changes in patent term and scope on innovation and welfare, using the estimated elasticities from the DiD and IV regressions as inputs into our theoretical formulas. Consistent with the theoretical results in Gallini (1992), we find that longer-lived patents increase costly patent challenges, and are inefficient for promoting new drug development. Shorter patent terms would reduce costly patent challenges, while broader patents would restore incentives to develop new drugs. Also, shorter-lived patents would expire earlier, thereby ensuring swifter access to generics. To restore the incentives to innovate the shortened patent term should be compensated by broadening the scope of new drug patent protection, for example, by awarding product patents instead of method patents, awarding longer market and data exclusivity periods for broader categories of new drugs, and restricting provisions for compulsory licensing.

Earth is coming out of the hottest year on record, amplifying the destruction from hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and drought. The oceans remain alarmingly warm, triggering the fourth global coral bleaching event in history. Concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere have reached levels not seen on this planet for millions of years, while humanity’s demand for the fossil fuels that produce this pollution is the highest it has ever been.

Yet at the same time, the world may be closer than ever to turning a corner in the effort to corral climate change.

Today, thanks to rapid growth in clean energy, humanity has started to bend the emissions curve. Current policies put us on pace for roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 — a better result, but still devastating.

Many countries have vowed to slash emissions even faster. So far those promises exist mostly on paper, but if nations follow through, the world could potentially limit total warming to around 2 to 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The U.S. patent system is one of the greatest inventions of all time. No bureaucrat could possibly determine how much to reward creators of society’s most valued advances; the patent system does it automatically by granting the inventor exclusive use of the invention for 20 years. That means that if I come up with a new and improved solar panel, I alone can profit from my invention for two decades — you either have to buy it from me or pay a licensing fee to replicate my design. As economist Adam Smith noted in 1762, “If the invention be good and such as is profitable to mankind, he will probably make a fortune by it; but if it be of no value he also will reap no benefit.” Patents are so important that the Founders mentioned them in the Constitution as one of the essential powers of Congress.

That window of exclusivity is somewhat arbitrary but has become standard throughout the world. Although the patent system has served inventors well, it risks being an obstacle to the widespread adoption of technologies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many of the people and places that would benefit most from these innovations cannot afford the licensing fees, and so the tools that could lead to a low-carbon, or even carbon-negative, future remain out of reach to them.

So, the question becomes: how can we look to maximize the positive effects of driving research and development while mitigating some of the negative externalities, such as barriers to access for smaller entities and crucial research efforts? Within the existing patent system, some simple, high-level solutions might include lowering royalty rates, upping maintenance fees for the registrant, and limiting the area of registration or the length of the patent’s validity. Lowering royalty rates is helpful in decreasing the barrier to entry for smaller entities, allowing them to access the technology at a lower cost per unit, while simultaneously increasing the maintenance fee for certain applications could be a valuable incentive to help the registrant reconsider exclusivity for a more impactful technology. Limiting the area of registration (several countries’ registration individually vs. 150 countries through the PCT) may allow smaller countries to perform vital research on energy and carbon capture without having to worry as much about exclusivity. Decreasing the length of the validity of the patent would allow for the public domain to access an essential sustainable technology much sooner. In addition to these solutions, Tur-Sinai (2018) suggests that an answer within the patent system for correcting the mismatch between social need and market demand could include “looking beyond IP and increasing the use of other incentive mechanisms, including prizes and research subsidies” and “integrating into innovation policy” measures like command-and-control regulation, cap-and-trade/carbon tax, and better dissemination of information. In reality, the US Patent and Trademark Office (or USPTO) rolled out the Climate Change Mitigation Pilot Program last year (2022), detailing quicker vetting of patent applications for “technologies that mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions” (“USPTO Announces Launch of Climate Change Mitigation Pilot Program” 2022). Hopefully, the necessity of sustainable technologies, in combination with this pilot program, will mean faster development for renewable tech and an incentive for future development. Aided by necessary considerations of greater access to researchers and countries around the world and in equating market pricing with social value, this pilot program and investment in sustainability by big names like SpaceX, ExxonMobil, and even governments, may lead us to a sustainable and innovative, yet equitable, future across the globe.