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BGonline.org Forums
My view on information
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: My view on information (Michael Petch)
Date: Saturday, 29 January 2011, at 4:36 p.m.
Part of my job at Big Oil back in the day was studying the patents of our competitors, and also any other patents related to processes similar to what we were researching at the time.
If you wanted to see petroleum- and petrochemical-related patents of interest from the oil-rich countries of the Middle East, or of what was then the Soviet Union, you could forget about it. Middle Eastern patents were almost nonexistent, and the Russian ones were full of sloppy data--I remember that one patented something that was thermodynamically impossible, unless you resort to Maxwell's Demon.
But if you were interested in patents from countries with strong protection of intellectual property, you'd always find something to study. The United States, Germany, and Japan were all producers of good, well-written and well-researched patent information. There would occasionally be a contender from some part of Europe that didn't produce or process oil, such as France or Italy. (The merits of the latter's patents were debated--I did give some of them at least a once-over, but a chemist I collaborated with kept his copies in a file folder labeled "Great Italian Fiction".)
Some of these patents were nominally Belgian, but the originators were invariably from elsewhere. Belgium had a speedier approval process, so if one German company thought another one was racing them for the right to license a process, they often took their write-up to the Belgian office first. At least Belgium invented something--a bureaucracy that was able to hurry.
But if you were to say that one of these companies should spend bookoo dinero on the development of a process, then have to turn it loose to "humanity" without even first getting their 17 years of license fees for it, there would have not only been no patents to study, but no progress in product development, process efficiency, or pollution abatement. I'm sure the drill is the same in pharmaceuticals, textiles, and any other process industry we could name.
It's not a big leap to a comparison to books. It's a lot more work to write a book than it is to produce blog or BB posts like this one. There also may be direct expense involved, and of course there is opportunity cost because of the (substantial) time invested. If there were no compensation for the extra work involved, we'd find ourselves in a world of bloggers, with the most creative people likely not bothering to join the chatter. Neil Gaiman, for example, might still create for free--or get a job packing holiday cheese and sausage boxes for Hickory Farms. Financially, the choice would be easy, so it might come down to whether he feels the need for the money or not.
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