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Patent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.

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Thursday, January 05, 2006

Tide Change in EU IP Policy?

With

my earlier posting I had pointed to an

evaluation paper on the protection EU law gives to databases recently drawn up by the EU Commission. In the context of this evaluation report,

Mr. James Boyle

writes in the

FT:

"[...] Commission insiders hint that the study may be part of a larger - and welcome - transformation in which a more professional and empirically-based look is being taken at the competitive effects of intellectual property protection. Could we be moving away from faith-based policy in which the assumption is that the more new rights we create, the better off we will be? [...]"

Actually I have no clue who those "Commission insiders" might be and whether or not

other activities as announced by the EU Commission might also be linked to this matter in question; see

my earlier posting. Well, I do not buy any general doctrine saying that in politics it must always be possible to precisely distinguish between something like a "faith-based policy" and an "empirically-based look". Of course, it can never be a bad thing to attempt to look at the particular effects of a given policy. And I do not promote any borderless extension of IP rights. But politics in general and economics in particular are not science where you repeatedly can set up and run various experiments in order the learn on the network between causes and their related effects. For example, it is entirely unclear as to whether or not any relative decrease of EU database production compared to the U.S. is caused by different systems of legal protection or by other factors of economy. Misguided empirics might, under suitable circumstances, well be utilised as a gateway for other influences fuelled and guided by value-based political motivations but cloaked as pseudo-scientific empirically hardened law of economics. Hence, I would be in favour of some more balanced approach, looking at the effects of politics where such effects are clearly and reliably identifiable but refraining from reducing politics to some sort of pseudo-science.

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