IP Economy

In his Blog PatentlyO, Mr Dennis Crouch writes:

"For a while, pirates have had counter-culture cool, plus Johnny Depp. Now, that the evils of armed East African piracy have begun receiving attention from the press and the military, I suggest it is time to move away from using the same piracy term to describe patent and copyright infringement"

linking to some BSA video on YouTube obviously utilising the concept of Piracy in some inappropriate context:

Prof. Dr. Dietmar Harhoff (Photo: BMWT)

GRUR is a German not-for-profit organisation dedicated to connect people interested in intellectual property and copyright. The Bavarian chapter of GRUR usually organises meetings comprising a presentation on IP law themes once a month or so. On Thursday March 12, 2006, Professor Dr. Dietmar Harhoff (LinkedIn) gave his presentation on "Patent Protection and Innovation". Mr. Harhoff is a distinguished economist and Director of the Institute for Innovation Research, Technology Management and Entrepreneurship of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

From time to time I find it interesting to play around with Google Trends where one can obtain a rough quantitative estimate of the search volume produced by the users of Google.com for certain keywords. Below you can see the chart for patent:

Google Trends chart for "patent"

Without doubt there is a steady decline in searching for patent during the past years 2003-2008.

Last Saturday a horrible business week ended which saw a climax of the current crisis of financial institutions, banks, and stockmarkets. Governments in America and Europe scrambled to rescue a collapsing system. The Economist  finds that much of the rich world is already in recession, partly because of tighter credit and partly because of the surge in oil prices earlier this year. Output is falling in Britain, France, Germany and Japan. Judging by the pace of job losses and the weakness of consumer spending, America’s economy is also shrinking. AFP knows that, for example, Japan's core machinery orders plunged at the fastest pace in two years, reinforcing fears that Asia's largest economy has slipped into a recession.

If the financial crisis means that many lawyers and bankers specialising in mergers and acquisitions are twiddling their thumbs - will patent attorneys do the same in near future?

Thus I asked myself: What will likely be the impact thereof on the IP system? Will there be a specific impact at all?