Patents

In Kyle’s wiki, patents function less as a legal instrument than as a measured outcome of innovation. The page enters the corpus through Matt Clancy, the innovation economist whose “Free Knowledge and Innovation” synthesizes evidence that new access to knowledge — public libraries, patent depositories, Wikipedia — produces measurable effects on patenting and citations. Patenting is the dependent variable in that argument: when people gain better access to knowledge, the visible signal is that they patent more and cite more. This makes patents one of the concrete, countable proxies underpinning the Open-Source Knowledge thesis that better access to Knowledge drives Innovation.

Context: A patent is a time-limited, government-granted exclusive right to an invention, disclosed publicly in exchange for that protection. Patent counts and citation networks are a standard (if imperfect) empirical proxy economists use to measure inventive activity.

Where this appears

• Matt Clancy — patenting and patent depositories are the measured innovation outcomes in Clancy’s synthesis of how access to knowledge drives innovation
• The Case Against Patents: Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2013) take the opposite view from patents-as-innovation-metric. They find “no empirical evidence” that patents increase innovation or productivity and propose phasing them out. Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2014) after Planet Money Episode 551 (July 9, 2014).

From “Things To Internet”

• Larry Lessig (saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet,” c. mid-2015). Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law School professor whose public work is on Intellectual Property and the commons: he co-founded Creative Commons and wrote The Future of Ideas (2001) and Free Culture (2004), books arguing that ever-expanding intellectual-property protection shrinks the public domain that new work draws on (Wikipedia).