Globalization, Standards and Intellectual Property Rights

The developed world enjoys many advantages over developing nations, including some that are not so obvious - such as disproportionate benefits from standard setting, fueled in part by the vast patent portfolios of multinational corporations. Unless a greater effort is made to adopt royalty free standards, the result may be a future filled with international standards wars.

In centuries past, colonial powers used the cheap labor provided by their new subjects to extract resources, and their new colonies as captive markets for their own manufactured goods. Today, similar results can be achieved with much less effort when royalty bearing patent claims are embedded in the standards for products such as DVD players and cellular phones. If the ...

China has long been the scene of piracy for software such as Microsoft Office. Recently, though, the Chinese government has begun cracking down on illegal copying of copyrighted works. That sounded like good news for Microsoft — until the Chinese government signaled its intention to promote local efforts to replace, rather than copy, Microsoft's dominant Office suite, using a new home ...

The designers of virtual worlds have the freedom to specify whatever rules they wish for their creations, whereas our physical world must obey real, inviolable laws that have logical explanations. Right? Now let's see, what exactly did I do with all that Dark Matter, anyway?