Re: [Fsfe-uk] Call for Evidence on Patents, Copyright, Enforcement, Competition and SME access to services

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 09:38 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Do you think there's an opportunity to point out these defects of the
> evidence call in a way that could be included?
> 
> Given that the pro-IP lobby will submit stuff anyway, is there much
> damage in responding with whatever we do have?

Fundamentally the answer has to be yes & no; we may as well send in
something and it's not likely to do much damage. I just suspect that it
may well get set aside because basically we'd be telling them how to
interpret the evidence which, if they're good at examining the
methodology, ought to be something they can figure out for themselves.

The whole SME thing is a bit of a dead-giveaway too, because the
definition for SME basically covers 90% or something of businesses in
this country. There's a fundamental bias in attempting to divide
enterprise between small/medium and large, and as I'm sure you know an
organisation of a handful of people is absolutely nothing like an
organisation with 75.

Government have been told time and again that micro-businesses and small
business (which again covers some substantial proportion of businesses
in this country, 50% if you believe some) cannot be lumped in with
medium enterprise; the issues are totally different. I've not seen much
sign of that attitude changing, so I don't necessarily rate our chances
of changing the other fundamental biases in what they're asking for.

You're probably much more qualified than I to talk about this type of
bias in technical terms, and probably the best way of attempting to get
this across would be to look for studies on Google Scholar (or
equivalent, if someone has access to the $$ sites?) and to a basic
analysis of them. If we can not only warn them about these biases, but
demonstrate them in studies, that would be a powerful statement IMO.

Essentially the message would need to be that they cannot extend results
from large-ish SMEs, particularly those VC-funded or similar, to the
wider population of business. Of course, this cuts both ways: the
interpretive result could be "IP is great for business, but SMEs have
neither the skills or the resources to make best of it". And
fundamentally I'm sure that's true, they won't have the specialist IP
skills.

Is there anyone else on the list who would have time to scare up some
academic papers that look at any aspect of this stuff? 

Cheers

Alex.


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