There is a thread running through lots of today's debates about intellectual property such as copyright, patents etc.

The liberal approach to these matters is really interesting when thinking about the granting of exclusive rights in return for a public and/or private benefit.

Anyone up for discussing this here?

Sure.
There are a number of distortions produced by current IP. One is that pharmaceutical companies look for symptom alleviation rather than outright cures. Also many simple cures in medicine are not researched because they cannot be "owned" through IP.

One suggestion is to change the incentive structure to give local government hypothecated taxes for health service provision but which can be directed into things which help people stay healthy such as building cycle paths, restricting licencing for pubs etc.

In this way simple cures could also be encouraged more which don't rely on IP to bring about the incentives.

There are other ways of introducing incentives where IP fails or distorts which may help to turn back the commercialisation of academic research and other professions and return them to an ethos of providing the best service to society rather than the best profits for business.

We need to recognise the physical economy and what is happening in terms of how people are living and not just look at money. This will help us formulate policy based on principles and values and not on slavish adherence to commerce.

I'd join a discussion project on IP. I agree there is a distinct and interesting contribution to the current national debate to be made from a liberal perspective.

Moderators: what about it?

There are lots of problems with the pharmaceutical/healthcare industry, but one must be careful of putting all the blame on the patent regime. The way healthcare is funded, particularly in the US, is at least as important. It's true that the most profitable drugs are those that must be taken for life rather than as a single course of curative treatment.

Today's pharmaceutical companies do tend to concentrate on what might be called "lifestyle enhancers" rather than medical cures - most of their current blockbuster drugs deal with conditions caused by a prosperous lifestyle. This raises a number of ethical questions and the rather artificial line between recreational and medical use gets even further blurred.

It's certainly true that the pharmacos are major patentees; but the patent system is potentially very important for a whole range of creative technical industries beyond the pharmaceutical sector.

I'd be up for discussing IP, but I'm not sure how politically urgent it is. The copyright regime has just been reformed and it's far too early to see how it's going to settle down. To be frank, a lot of the present fuss is coming from people who are still upset that they didn't get everything they wanted in the 2002 Information Society Directive and its national implementations. Business models are changing, not because of copyright law, but because of the technology: Open Source software, the Creative Commons etc. These radical changes don't need legislative change. In any case, copyright operates internationally and momentum for change is driven by WIPO and, to a lesser extent, the EU.

Patents are still national, and an affordable community or international patent regime - removing the excessive costs of community-wide patents - is agreed by everyone involved to be a very desirable reform stuck against the massive vested interests of national patent establishments, particularly in this age of globalisation.

Perhaps the only "live" legislative issue is software patenting, despite its heavy defeat in the Parliament last year.

IP is certainly not one of the big traditional public policy areas like education or health, or a 'meta issue' like localism, and that might be a case for placing it lower on the to-do list, but I think it's a little more 'live' than you suggest, Ejoftheweb.

It's not really true to say that copyright 'operates internationally': there is increasing harmonisation, certainly, particularly within the EU, and pressure for global enforcement, but copyright laws are still passed at the national level, and there is opportunity for individual countries to develop distinct approaches to IP, witness Brazil.

One specific debate in the UK which is coming up is whether we should follow the US and extend copyright to the author's life plus 95 years, or keep it at +70, as it currently is. It would be nice for this to be a debate, and for it to be discussed as a matter of cultural as well as industrial policy, and not decided by industry lobbying.

As you say, technology is changing rapidly, and business models are struggling to catch up, but legislation needs to keep pace too - it's not rendered unnecessary by technological change - because the alternatives are outdated legislation, or anarchy.

The announcement last week by the Chancellor of the Gowers review does indeed indicate that it's a live issue.

Small correction - there's no suggestion that the term of copyright in creative works will be extended; it will stay at life+70 in the EU and the US. The debate is over the copyright in sound recordings (considered a neighbouring right in many jurisdictions), which in the EU is 50yrs flat, whereas in the USA it's 95 years flat. There is harmonisation pressure from the record companies on this one, but I expect it to be resisted in the rest of Europe because it was only recently extended from 20 to 50. The power politics of copyright are quite different in the US and Europe; in the US, the corporate interests are very powerful, whereas in continental europe it tends to be the authors' and composers' societies, who don't stand to benefit from the proposed term extension for sound recordings.

Patents are still very much national in application; there's no overriding convention or "national treatment" as there is in copyright under Berne, and it's probably patents on which Gowers will concentrate.