GioBlog

Good news: No climate change treaty this year

I'm in Geneva this week for a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), so this week I'm kinda in an IP frame of mind.

Today's good news is that no binding treaty is going to come out of next month's Copenhagen conference on climate change.

It's good news for any number of reasons one of which is that the global IP skeptic community will not be able to use climate issues to undermine international patent rights on "green" technologies, at least not now, and at least not through this mechanism.

The global IP skeptic movement uses any available issue to rail against patents and to demand that patents be weakened or even done away with in order to facilitate the transfer of technology from rich countries to poor countries (failing of course to recognize that patents are the best means of knowledge and technology transfer ever conceived). They've been quick to jump on the climate bandwagon in order to chip away at patent rights in what is sure to be one of the biggest areas of future innovation, green tech.

You don't need to be terrified of climate change to understand the importance of green technologies. Any new technological means of diversifying our energy portfolio, and of reducing dependency on fossil fuels, can only be a good thing. Why would we not want to take advantage of the sun, the wind, gravity, tides and other natural and inexhaustible sources in order to generate power?

You don't need a climate crisis (real, exaggerated or imagined) in order to see the value of green technologies.

Especially in the United States, an urgent priority should be reducing our dependency on Middle Eastern sources for oil. It's generally believed that the more economically interdependent nations are, the more they are likely to operate in ways that are mutually beneficial. This was the argument for opening up trade with China and doing away with the annual debate over Most Favored Nation status for China, you may recall.

But this has NOT been the result of U.S. dependence on the Middle East. American dollars paid to Saudis and other Middle Eastern nations for oil has gone directly to the radicalization of the Islamic world against the West and against the United States and its interests.

It is clearly in the best interests of the United States for us to develop such green technologies as will reduce such counterproductive subsidies, as well as power future technological innovation. At some point we run into a wall where cheaper, more abundant sources of power will be necessary to fuel our path to a "Star Trek" type of future.

We'll never get this kind of innovation without patents. The patent form of property rights gives innovators some marginal security that, if they develop a useful technology, they will be able to exploit it, trade it, license it, sell it, or otherwise leverage their work. A patent by no means guarantees profits, as any inventor or innovator can attest. But patents at least make it possible.

It's also important to remember that the alternative to patents is not the free gift of knowledge and innovation to all takers. No, the alternative to patents is trade secrets, where knowledge is kept in a locked company vault rather than published in detail on the Internet, such as patent knowledge is today.

Patents are an ingenious combination of knowledge disclosure and property rights. Both the inventor and the larger community benefit from patents.

That's why patent rights have fueled such tremendous technological innovation, and why it's critical that strong patent rights not be traded away out of some misguided sense of charity to the developing nations of the world.

Would the Obama administration have figuratively bowed to the developing nations of the world and traded away strong patent rights for international acclaim and adoration? I don't know, and it isn't worth the risk.

So, today, Americans should celebrate the failure of international negotiators to cobble together an agreement which beyond doubt would have posed new and additional risk to economic growth, both at home and abroad.

[I should also point out that the biggest factor behind the slowdown in climate talks is the failure of the U.S. to pass cap-and-trade legislation. So one of the domino effects of activism against the U.S. cap-and-trade legislation is no Copenhagen treaty. A beneficial domino effect, I might add.]