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Book Title: Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Competition Law
Editor(s): Drexl, Josef
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420475
Section: Chapter 12
Section Title: New Technologies and Mergers
Author(s): Bejček, Josef
Number of pages: 28
Extract:
12 New technologies and mergers
Josef Bejcek
1 General remarks
1.1 Intellectual property rights and innovations
`Some of us often suppose that the best things in life are free. Most of us get
along by developing the ideas of others. That is how the world progresses.'1
Too strong protection of individual achievements may slow down the general
advance. On the other hand, too weak protection can prevent anybody from
inventing anything. From the point of view of a consumer, intellectual prop-
erty rights (IPRs) are a kind of `trade-off' between long-term gains and short-
term gains. Consumers would be better off in the short term if the results of
someone else's creative efforts could be freely copied, for this would lower the
price of products involving IPRs. But from a long-term perspective, the
consumers would become losers because they would be giving up the incen-
tives that IPRs afford the creators.2
The main concern of this dilemma is illustrated by some lines from J.M.
Clark's book Competition as a Dynamic Process from the year 1961 written
in verse. He stated:
We all agree that innovation
Will benefit both world and nation
The question we must answer later
Is, will it help the innovator?
The analysis of the reality is unfortunately not too poetic. It is, of course,
very cheap to criticize someone else's attempt to write in verse. Nevertheless,
although it is sometimes argued that the pressure to rhyme makes ...
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ELECD/2008/254.html